MRI/CT image fusion using Gabor texture features

Abstract

Image fusion has been extensively used in the field of medical imaging by medical practitioners for analysis of images. The aim of image fusion is to combine information from different images in the output fused image without adding artefacts. The output has to contain all information form the individual images without introducing artifacts. In images that contains more textural properties, it will be more effective in terms of fusion, if we include all the textures contained in the corresponding individual images. Keeping the above objective in mind, we propose the use of Gabor filter for analysing the texture, because under this method the filter parameters can be tunned depending upon the textures in the corresponding images. The fusion is performed on the individual textural components to the two input images and then all the fused texture images are combined together to get the final fused image. To this the fused residual image obtained by combining the residue of the two images can be added to increase the information content. This approach was tested on MRI and CT images considering both mono-modal and multi-modal cases and the results are promising.