Medical Image Fusion

Abstract

A novel approach for medical image fusion is presented, which is developed by taking into account the spectral and spatial characteristics of image. After the medical images to be fused are decomposed by the weighted technique, different-fusion schemes for combining the coefficients are proposed: coefficients in low-frequency band are selected with a visibility-based scheme, and coefficients in high-frequency bands are selected with a variance based method. The fused image is finally constructed by the inverse process with all composite coefficients. To quantitatively evaluate and prove the performance of the proposed method, series of experiments and comparisons with some existing fusion methods are carried out. Experimental results on real medical images indicate that the proposed method is effective and can get satisfactory fusion results.