Capture and fusion of 3d surface texture

Image fusion is a process that multiple images of a scene are combined to form a single image. The aim of image fusion is to preserve the full content and retain important features of each original image. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on wavelet transform to capture and fusion of real-world rough surface textures, which are commonly used in multimedia applications and referred to as3D surface texture. These textures are different from 2D textures as their appearances can vary dramatically with different illumination conditions due to complex surface geometry and reflectance properties. In our approach, we first extract gradient/height and albedo maps from sample 3D surface texture images as their representation. Then we measure saliency of wavelet coefficients of these 3D surface texture representations. The saliency values reflect the meaningful content of the wavelet coefficients and are consistent with human visual perception. Finally we fuse the gradient/height and albedo maps based on the measured saliency values. This novel scheme aims to preserve the original texture patterns together with geometry and reflectance characteristics from input images. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can not only capture and fuse 3D surface texture under arbitrary illumination directions, but also has the ability to retain the surface geometry properties and preserve perceptual features in the original images.