Multi-focus image fusion based on non-subsampled shearlet transform and sparse representation

Abstract

To overcome the artifact phenomenon caused by the incomplete registration of the source images, a new multi-focus image fusion approach is proposed based on sparse representation and non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST). Firstly, the source images are decomposed to low- and high-frequency coefficients by NSST. The sparse representation is then adopted to fuse the low-frequency coefficients. For the high-frequency coefficients, a maximum sum-modified-Laplacian (SML) rule is put forward to merge them. Finally, the resultant image is obtained by the inverse NSST on the fused coefficients. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can achieve satisfied effect compared with various existing image fusion methods.