Non-subsampled contourlet based feature level fusion using fuzzy logic and golden section algorithm for multisensor imaging systems

With the recent developments in the field of visual sensor technology, multiple imaging sensors are used in several applications such as surveillance, medical imaging and machine vision, in order to improve their capabilities. The goal of any efficient image fusion algorithm is to combine the visual information, obtained from a number of disparate imaging sensors, into a single fused image without the introduction of distortion or loss of information. The existing fusion algorithms employ either the mean or choose-max fusion rule for selecting the best features for fusion. The choose-max rule distorts constants background information whereas the mean rule blurs the edges. In this paper, Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) based two feature-level fusion schemes are proposed and compared. In the first method Fuzzy logic is applied to determine the weights to be assigned to each segmented region using the salient region feature values computed. The second method employs Golden Section Algorithm (GSA) to achieve the optimal fusion weights of each region based on its Petrovic metric. The regions are merged adaptively using the weights determined. Experiments show that the proposed feature-level fusion methods provide better visual quality with clear edge information and objective quality metrics than individual multi-resolution-based methods such as Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform and NSCT.