Image fusion using daubechies complex wavelet transform and lifting wavelet transform: A multiresolution approach

For the retrieval of complementary information from medical images fusion of multimodal medical images is necessary. The fused image should not introduce any undesired feature and the fusion process should possess all relevant information. In more precise diagnosis and better treatment the medical image fusion facilities are used. Higher accuracy and reliability are provided by fused image. Shift sensitivity, poor directionality and lack of any phase information are real valued wavelet transform based fusion method properties. Therefore Daubechies complex wavelet transform is used for image fusion, since it has less computational requirements and availability of phase information. Here proposed a new multilevel Daubechies complex wavelet transform (DCxWT) based multimodal medical image fusion method which follows multi-resolution principle. Fusion of complex wavelet coefficients of source images using maximum selection rule takes place in this method. The proposed fusion method visually and quantitatively compared with LWT using entropy and standard deviation metrics. Robustness of the proposed method tested against Gaussian, salt and pepper and speckle noise. Comparison results clearly show that the proposed fusion scheme with DCxWT outperforms existing LWT based fusion method.