Medical image fusion, which aims to derive complementary information from multi-modality medical images, plays an important role in many clinical applications, such as medical diagnostics and treatment. We propose the LatLRR-FCNs, which is a hybrid medical image fusion framework consisting of the latent low-rank representation (LatLRR) and the fully convolutional networks (FCNs). Specifically, the LatLRR module is used to decompose the multi-modality medical images into low-rank and saliency components, which can provide fine-grained details and preserve energies, respectively. The FCN module aims to preserve both global and local information by generating the weighting maps for each modality image. The final weighting map is obtained using the weighted local energy and the weighted sum of the eight-neighborhood-based modified Laplacian method. The fused low-rank component is generated by combining the low-rank components of each modality image according to the guidance provided by the final weighting map within pyramid-based fusion. A simple sum strategy is used for the saliency components. The usefulness and efficiency of the proposed framework are thoroughly evaluated on four medical image fusion tasks, including computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR), T1- and T2-weighted MR, positron emission tomography and MR, and single-photon emission CT and MR. The results demonstrate that by leveraging the LatLRR for image detail extraction and the FCNs for global and local information description, we can achieve performance superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective assessment and visual quality in some cases. Furthermore, our method has a competitive performance in terms of computational costs compared to other baselines.
Exploring a unified low rank representation for multi-focus image fusion