A stereo micro image fusion algorithm based on expectation-maximization technique

Abstract

Due to the limitation of Depth Of Field (DOF) of microscope, the regions which are not within the DOF will be blurring after imaging. Thus for micro image fusion, the most important step is to identify the blurring regions within each micro image, so as to remove their undesirable impacts on the fused image. In this paper, a fusion algorithm based on an Expectation-Maximization (EM) technique is proposed for stereo micro image fusion. The local sharpness of stereo micro image is judged by EM technique, and then the sharpness regions are clustered completely. Finally, the stereo micro images are fused with pixel-wise fusion rules. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm benefits from the novel region segmentation and it is able to obtain fused stereo micro image with higher sharpness compared with some popular image fusion method. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.