Multifocus color image fusion based on walsh Hadamard transform and sum- modified-Laplacian focus measure

Abstract

Multi-focus image fusion objective is to add relevant information from multiple images of the same scene but with different focuses into a sharper image that is more suitable for visual sensor networks. Natural and artificially obtained multifocus color images are considered for fusion. The existing fusion methods like multi scale and multi-resolution transforms are proved to be good in Multi-focus Image Fusion. However, they suffer from computational complexity in kernels calculation. In this paper, Multi-focus color Image Fusion based on Walsh- Hadamard Transform and sum-modified-Laplacian focus measure is proposed. Walsh-Hadamard Transform is a non-sinusoidal, orthogonal transform with symmetry, seperability and orthogonal properties. These properties make it more apt for image fusion than other transforms. And the sum-modified-Laplacian focus measure helps to get sharper image. Proposed method performance is evaluated in terms of reference and non-reference measures. The experimental results indicate that proposed method not only produces sharp details in fused image but also reduces the computational complexity.