Multifocus Image Fusion Based on Multiresolution Transform and Particle Swarm Optimization

In order to get an image with every object in focus, an image fusion process is required to fuse the images under different focal settings. In this paper, a novel multifocus image fusion algorithm based on multiresolution transform and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed. Firstly the source images are decomposed into lowpass subbands coefficients and highpass subbands coefficients by the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). Then, different fusion rules are applied for low and high frequency NSCT coefficients. Finally the fused image is reconstructed by the inverse NSCT transform. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and can provide better performance than the method based on the wavelet transform and the nonsubsampled contourlet transform.