Qualitative and Quantitave Analysis of Six Image Fusion Methodologies and Their Application to Medical Imaging

In this paper, six existing image fusion algorithms, and their application to medical images are studied. Quantitative measurements used in the literature were tested on synthetic data to verify their consistency with qualitative analysis. Each of these algorithms was optimized for quantitative measures which our experiments found consistent with visual qualitative analysis. Finally, algorithms with the optimal parameters were tested on medical data, and corresponding quantitative analysis is provided. Our experiments suggest that, for medical image fusion, the use of Contour let transform achieves the best results. Although, the stationary wavelet transform provided similar quantitative result with substantially less computational complexity.