Image fusion using a NSDFB-based contourlet packet

In this paper, a new contourlet packet (CP) is constructed based on a complete wavelet quadtree followed by a nonsubsampled directional filter bank (NSDFB). By combing the finer approximation characteristic of wavelet packet with the invertible characteristic of NSDFB, the proposed CP can give more accurate reconstruction of images than WP. After the proposed CP transform on the fusing images, the low-frequency subbands are compared to preserve the coefficients whose module are minimum, local inner-product rule is performed on the high-frequency subbands of the images. Then the fusion image can be obtained by taking an inverse CP transform. The experiment results show the superiority of the method to Contourlet, Wavelet packet, NSCT, stationary Wavelet, complex wavelet and WBCP based fusion methods, both in image clarity and standard deviation, information entropy, average gradient, average cross