Multimodal medical image fusion using Butterworth high pass filter and Cross bilateral filter

Abstract

Multimodal Medical Image fusion is a prominent area of interest. Medical image fusion is the process of combining images from different modalities. It improves imaging quality and reduces the redundant information. The main aim of Medical Image fusion is in having better quality of fused image for the diagnostic purposes. Image fusion improves capability and reliability of images. In medical background, sharpness of fused image is the basic criteria of quality. In this paper, quality of fused image can be enhanced by using combination of Butterworth High Pass filter and Cross Bilateral filter. Cross bilateral filter is a nonlinear filter, which takes both range domain and spatial domain filtering into account. It is an edge preserving filter, which fuse images by taking weighted average of source image pixels. For better quality of fused results, the input images are sharpened using high order, Butterworth high pass filter and then images are fused with Cross Bilateral filter. Results show that the modified image fusion framework is effective in preserving fine details, information content and contrast of image.