Fusion of low contrast multifocus images

Recently, the multifocus image fusion method based on the first level of Empirical Mode Decomposition (L1_EMD) has been proposed. Subjective analysis performed on a publically available multifocus image dataset shown its superiority to other EMD and DWT based methods. But, the fusion results on low contrast images, from this and several other EMd and DWT methods, are poor. Therefore, this paper expands L1_EMD to fusion of low contrast images. Comparative analysis gives better results than other EMD and DWT methods. The major advantages of the proposed method are simplicity, absence of artifacts and contrast distortion, as well as straightforward applicability to color images.