A real-time curve evolution-based image fusion algorithm for multisensory image segmentation

A partial differential equation (PDE)-based feature-level image fusion approach is proposed for multisensory image segmentation. The energy functional of the proposed fusion model is a weighted sum of several functionals, each constructed based on the characteristics of the sensor image. The weight selection decides the way that the model handles redundant, conflicting, or complementary information involved in the multisensory data. The method is implemented using level sets and is fast enough for real-time segmentation tasks. Finally the algorithm is applied to the segmentation of x-ray and visual images, and the results show that the fusion algorithm is efficient, accurate, and robust.