Fusion of multifocus images by lattice structures

• A new image fusion algorithm based on 1-D lattice filter structures is proposed.
• Undecimated lattice structure is developed for image decomposition/reconstruction.
• Undecimated lattice structure is applied to multifocus image fusion.
• Proposed method is better than the classical wavelet based methods.

Image fusion methods based on multiscale transform (MST) suffer from high computational load due to the use of fast Fourier transforms (ffts) in the lowpass and highpass filtering steps. Lifting wavelet scheme which is based on second generation wavelets has been proposed as a solution to this issue. Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT) is composed of split, prediction and update operations all implemented in the spatial domain using multiplications and additions, thus computation time is highly reduced. Since image fusion performance benefits from undecimated transform, it has later been extended to Stationary Lifting Wavelet Transform (SLWT). In this paper, we propose to use the lattice filter for the MST analysis step. Lattice filter is composed of analysis and synthesis parts where simultaneous lowpass and highpass operations are performed in spatial domain with the help of additions/multiplications and delay operations, in a recursive structure which increases robustness to noise. Since the original filter is designed for the undecimated case, we have developed undecimated lattice structures, and applied them to the fusion of multifocus images. Fusion results and evaluation metrics show that the proposed method has better performance especially with noisy images while having similar computational load with LSWT based fusion method.