Image fusion for photonic quantum ring laser structures investigated by confocal scanning laser microscopy

Confocal Scanning Laser Microscopy (CSLM) allows the acquisition of image stacks, representing optical sections on the volume of the specimen. An image corresponding to an optical section will in some cases contain defocused, low contrast or saturated regions for the areas of the sample which are not in focal plane. In the case of the Photonic Quantum Ring (PQR) laser structures, it is important to have images consisting of regions of uniform quality in order to observe morphological details that are linked to the photocurrent confinement. In this purpose we have developed an image fusion method, which based on a stack of CSLM images will output a fused image consisting of square regions from different images in the stack. In this paper we present the image fusion algorithm that we have used and the results that we have obtained on PQR laser structures.