Multi-Focus Image Fusion Based on Dual-Channel Rybak Neural Network and Consistency Verification in NSCT Domain

Abstract

In multi-focus image fusion, accurately detecting and extracting focused regions remains a key challenge. Some existing methods suffer from misjudgment of focus areas, resulting in incorrect focus information or the unintended retention of blurred regions in the fused image. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel multi-focus image fusion method that leverages a dual-channel Rybak neural network combined with consistency verification in the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. Specifically, the high-frequency sub-bands produced by NSCT decomposition are processed using the dual-channel Rybak neural network and a consistency verification strategy, allowing for more accurate extraction and integration of salient details. Meanwhile, the low-frequency sub-bands are fused using a simple averaging approach to preserve the overall structure and brightness information. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been thoroughly evaluated through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on three widely used public datasets: Lytro, MFFW, and MFI-WHU. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art image fusion techniques, including both traditional algorithms and deep learning-based approaches, in terms of visual quality and objective performance metrics (QAB/F, QCB, QE, QFMI, QMI, QMSE, QNCIE, QNMI, QP, and QPSNR). These results clearly demonstrate the robustness and superiority of the proposed fusion framework in handling multi-focus image fusion tasks.