Brain Medical Image Fusion Using L2-Norm-Based Features and Fuzzy-Weighted Measurements in 2-D Littlewood-Paley EWT Domain

Abstract

Computational imaging provides comprehensive and reliable information about human tissue for medical diagnosis and treatment, with medical image fusion as one of the most important technologies in the field. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD), a promising model for image processing, has been used for image fusion in some methods. However, the varying number of decomposed layers leads to problems using EMD for image fusion. In this article, we propose a fusion method for medical images incorporating L2-norm-based features, a match/salience/fuzzy-weighted measure, and the 2-D Littlewood-Paley empirical wavelet transform (2-D LPEWT) as new version of EMD. We first decompose medical images with LPEWT to obtain the residual component (residue) and detailed sub-images that are named as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then we extract the regional features of residue with an L2-norm-based model to fuse the residue while simultaneously fusing IMFs using a method combining a fuzzy membership function with a match/salience measurement. Finally, we reconstruct the comprehensive image by applying inverse LPEWT to the fused residue and IMFs. We evaluated our method using a frequently-used data set of brain images. The results show that our proposed method is more effective than conventional methods by fusing more information into the final images. We also show a feasible scheme for applying EMD to image fusion.