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ABSTRACT one is kept and others are eliminated. Suppose the slices
In this paper, a new wavelet based image fusion method is are f1 , f2 , ..., fn . To find the corresponding edge pixels of
proposed. In this method, the blur levels of the edge points an edge pixel in slice k located at (xk , yk ), we look in the
are estimated for every slice in the stack of images. Then from neighborhood of that position in other slices(fi , i = k). The
corresponding edge points in different slices, the sharpest one radius of neighborhood under inspection is set equal to the
is brought to the final image and others are eliminated. The blur level of (xk , yk ). Now for every detected edge pixel, we
intensities of non-edge pixels are assigned by the slice of its know from which slice its intensity should be assigned. To
nearest neighbor edge. Results are promising and outperform assign the intensity of the non-edge pixels, we use the slice
other methods in most cases of the tested methods. of its nearest neighbor edge pixel.
In section 2 we present an overview of Ducottet’s method.
Index Terms— image fusion, blur estimation, local max- In section 3 the changes that we have made in Ducottet’s
ima, wavelet transform method are explained. In section 4 the new fusion method
is presented. In section 5, the results for synthetic and real
1. INTRODUCTION images are shown and a comparison has been done with other
methods. Finally a conclusion is given in section 6.
Image fusion is an important technique in image processing.
It is needed when we image non-flat objects while the depth
of field of the optics is not enough to sharply image the whole 2. EDGE DETECTION AND BLUR ESTIMATION
object at once. The solution is to combine several images,
each focusing on other parts of the object. Those images In Ducottet’s method, singularities of images are modeled as
should fuse to reach an image with as much sharp parts as transitions, lines or peaks.
possible. Transitions are modeled as the convolution of a Heaviside
In literature a lot of methods have been proposed for im- function (H) and a two dimensional Gaussian (G) with vari-
age fusion. A survey has been done in [1]. Some of them use ance σ 2 and amplitude A:
variance-based fusion, real and complex wavelet [2, 3] and
A x
curvelet [4]. Tσ (x, y) = AH(x, y) ∗ Gσ (x, y) = 1 + erf √
In existing wavelet-based methods, the fusion step is done 2 σ 2
in the transform domain by keeping the larger coefficients in (∗ is convolution). The line edge model is the convolution of
amplitude, because the assumption is that larger coefficients a Dirac line function and the Gaussian function:
are from the in-focus parts. As explained in [3, 4], after the in-
verse transform, the fused image may contain intensities that Lσ (x, y) = 2πσ 2 AGσ (x, 0)
are not present in any of the slices in the stack, so a post-
processing step is needed to overcome this problem. The peak edge model is the convolution of a Dirac point
Here we propose a new wavelet-based method where function with the Gaussian function:
the fusion step is done in the spatial domain, so no post-
processing is needed. In this method first, the edge pixels Pσ (x, y) = 2πσ 2 AGσ (x, y)
are detected and their blur level are estimated using Ducot-
tet’s method [5]. In addition to make some improvement in In the above equations, σ is the blur level of every edge model.
Ducottet’s method, we limit the edge detection to sharp parts Ducottet’s method can be summarized as follows:
by setting a scale-dependent threshold. Then from every 1. The undecimated wavelet transform of the input image
corresponding set of edge pixels in the stack, the sharpest is calculated for scales ranging from 1 to a selected maximum
Line
If we connect pixels of a given maxima function across scales,
Maxima Functions Moduli
0.3
0.25
it will be a 3 dimensional curve, because they are not from
0.2
0.15
the same locations in different scales. A difficulty here is
0.1
Peak in which location we should report an edge. In our work,
0.05 we have selected the third scale for edge localization for all
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 maxima functions, because the finer scales are more sensitive
scale
Fig. 1. Maxima functions for σ = 4, A = 1. to noise and in coarser scales, edges are affected by adjacent
edges. Another problem is that the maxima functions may not
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include a coefficient in coarser scales because the process of Now we have a labeled image that shows for some loca-
finding correspondences may stop in these scales. Since we tions from which slice the intensity should be assigned. For
only take into account maxima functions with at least three locations that have not been specified yet, we assign it like the
values, the maxima functions always have an edge pixel from closest labeled pixel.
the third scale. 300
intensity
200
100
image. We apply edge detection and blur estimation for ev- 200
ery slice in the stack. Then, for every slice, we have the edge 150
locations and their blur level. Now we combine all these in- 100
50
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(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 3. Fabric Ground truth image (a) and derived slices from
it (b-d).
(a) Real Image (b) Curvelet Result (c) Our Result
Fig. 5. Enlarged corresponding parts (To enhance the con-
Table 1. Results of different methods in dB
trast we applied color stretch contrast of Gimp Editor to these
Complex Db6
Complex Db6
New Method
with checks
images).
Variance
Curvelet
Leaves 28.75 39.20 34.97 41.27 45.35 [2] H. Li, B.S. Manjunath, and S.K. Mitra, “Multisensor im-
Metal 32.50 41.24 36.62 44.18 45.43 age fusion using the wavelet transform,” in Graphical
Fabric 41.47 41.25 35.50 43.14 47.15 Models and Image Processing, 1995, vol. 57 of 3, p. 235
Eggs 47.76 59.80 59.73 65.82 46.16 245.
Algae 53.34 62.17 58.77 63.92 52.98
[3] B. Forster, D. Vam De Ville, J. Berent, D. Sage, and
Clouds 54.79 49.26 49.21 52.73 53.40
M. Unser, “Complex wavelets for extended depth-of-
some parts, our proposed method works better. One of these field: A new method for the fusion of multichannel mi-
parts is highlighted in two output images. These parts accom- croscopy images,” in Microscopy Research and Tech-
panying with suitable slice in stack are enlarged and shown nique, 2004, vol. 65 of 1-2, pp. 33–42.
in Figure 5 . The curvelet method failed in this part , but our
[4] L. Tessens, A. Ledda, A. Pizurica, and W. Philips, “Ex-
proposed method has worked well.
tending the depth of field in microscopy through curvelet-
based frequency-adaptive image fusion,” in Proc. of
6. CONCLUSION the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech,
and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Honolulu, Hawaii,
The new method outperforms the other methods in half of the USA, 2007, pp. 861–864.
test cases and has the second best result in one case. For the
other two cases, the results are still acceptable. One advantage [5] C. Ducottet, T. Fournel, and C. Barat, “Scale-adaptive
of the new method is that it is based only on edge pixels in detection and local characterization of edges based on
the images, while other methods are based on all information wavelet transform,” Signal Processing, vol. 84, pp. 2115–
of the images. Another advantage is that the fusion step is 2137, 2004.
done in the spatial domain, so no post-processing is needed
for checking if any intensity is not in any slice of the stack. [6] C. L. Tu and W. L. Hwang, “Analysis of singularities
from modulus maxima of complex wavelets,” IEEE tran-
sations on Information Theory, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 1049–
7. REFERENCES 1062, 2005.
[1] A.G. Valdecasas, D. Marshall, J.M. Becerra, and J.J. Ter-
rero, “On the extended depth of focus algorithms for
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