Image Fusion Based on Contourlet Transform and Fuzzy Logic

In the research of image fusion, because the extent of each source image´s contribution to the fused image is uncertain, how to design a good fusion rule becomes important and difficult. Fuzzy logic is an efficient way to resolve uncertain problem, thus, a novel image fusion method based on contourlet transform and fuzzy logic is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the source images are decomposed using contourlet transform. Secondly, the contourlet coefficients are fused by choosing different rules. For the low frequency subband we ascertain the fusion coefficients by creating the fuzzy relations and estimating the importance of contourlet coefficients with fuzzy reasoning, while the high frequency subbands are merged with local gradient as weight. Finally, the fused coefficients are reconstructed to obtain fusion results. Experiments are carried out and the results are compared with some other methods, which show the approach is feasible and effective.