FPGA Implementation of CT/MRI Image Fusion using Lifting-based Discrete Wavelet Transform

The goal of image fusion is to combine two or more images into a single image, keeping the important information from each of the original images. Image fusion is a technique to improve the image content such that the resultant fused image will be useful for further analysis tasks. This paper presents FPGA implementation of fusion of medical images such as computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, based on application of lifting-based scheme of discrete wavelet transform. Pixel level fusion rules are applied after one level wavelet decomposition of input images. The results of proposed methods are compared and analyzed with different image quality metrics such as entropy, MES and PSNR. Keywords— Discrete wavelet transform (DWT), lifting scheme, haar transform, image fusion, FPGA, CT image, MRI image.