Multifocus image fusion using the log-Gabor transform and a Multisize Windows technique

Today, multiresolution (MR) transforms are a widespread tool for image fusion. They decorrelate the image into several scaled and oriented sub-bands, which are usually averaged over a certain neighborhood (window) to obtain a measure of saliency. First, this paper aims to evaluate log-Gabor filters, which have been successfully applied to other image processing tasks, as an appealing candidate for MR image fusion as compared to other wavelet families. Consequently, this paper also sheds further light on appropriate values for MR settings such as the number of orientations, number of scales, overcompleteness and noise robustness. Additionally, we revise the novel Multisize Windows (MW) technique as a general approach for MR frameworks that exploits advantages of different window sizes. For all of these purposes, the proposed techniques are firstly assessed on simulated noisy experiments of multifocus fusion and then on a real microscopy scenario. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.