The multiscale directional bilateral filter and its application to multisensor image fusion

In this paper, a novel multiscale geometrical analysis called the multiscale directional bilateral filter (MDBF) which introduces the nonsubsampled directional filter bank into the multiscale bilateral filter is proposed. Through combining the characteristic of preserving edge of the bilateral filter with the ability of capturing directional information of the directional filter bank, the MDBF can better represent the intrinsic geometrical structure of images. The MDBF, which is a multiscale, multidirectional and shift-invariant image decomposition scheme, is used to fuse multisensor images in this paper. The source images are first decomposed into the directional detail subbands and the approximation subbands via the MDBF. Then, the directional detail subbands and the approximation subbands are fused according to the given fusion rule, respectively. Finally, the inverse MDBF is applied to the fused subbands to obtain the fused image. Experimental results over visible and infrared images and medical images demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with conventional methods in terms of visual inspection and objective measures.

Research highlights
► Multiscale directional bilateral filter (MDBF) is presented.
► The MDBF can capture edge and directional information.
► The MDBF is used to multisensor image fusion.