Quality Assessment of Image Fusion Methods in Transform Domain

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze and compare the performance of fusion methods based on four different transforms: i) wavelet transform, ii) curvelet transform, iii) contourlet transform and iv) nonsubsampled contourlet transform. Fusion framework and scheme are explained in detail, and two different sets of images are used in our experiments. Furthermore, eight different performancemetrics are adopted to comparatively analyze the fusion results. The comparison results show that the nonsubsampled contourlet transform method performs better than the other three methods, both spatially and spectrally. We also observed from additional experiments that the decomposition level of 3 offered the best fusion performance, anddecomposition levels beyond level-3 did not significantly improve the fusion results.