HVS based enhanced medical image fusion

Abstract

Medical image fusion will help the physicians to extract the features visible in images by different modalities. In this paper, a novel discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based technique for medical image fusion is presented. Firstly, the medical images to be fused are extracted .Secondly conversion into grayscale is carried out before decomposition by the DWT. Then by considering the characteristics of human visual system (HVS) and the physical meaning of the wavelet coefficients, new different fusion schemes are performed on low frequency and high frequency bands separately, i.e. Visibility Based Scheme for the low frequency coefficients and Variance Based Scheme for the high frequency coefficients are applied. Finally, the fused image is constructed by the inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) with all the combined coefficients. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.