Multi-focus image fusion based on sparse decomposition and background detection

The goal of image fusion is to accurately and comprehensively describe complementary information of multiple source images in a new scene. Traditional fusion methods are easy to produce side-effects which cause artifacts and blurred edges. To solve these problems, a novel fusion algorithm based on robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and guided filter is proposed. The guided filter can preserve the edges effectively, which is often used to enhance the images without distort the details. Considering edges and flat area are treated differently by the guided filter, in this paper, sparse component of the source image is filtered by the guided filter to generate the enhanced image which contains the preserved edges and the enhanced background. And then the focused regions of the source images are detected by spatial frequency map of the difference images between the enhanced image and the corresponding source image. Finally, morphological algorithm is used to obtain precise fusion decision map. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the fusion performance obviously which outperforms the current fusion methods.