Visual attention guided image fusion with sparse representation

Image fusion techniques aim at transferring useful information from the input source images to the fused image. The common assumption for most fusion approaches is that the useful information is defined by local features such as contrast, variance, and gradient. However, there is no consideration of global visual attention of the whole source images which indicates the “interesting” information of the source images. In this paper, we firstly review the patch-based image fusion methods which attract the attention and interest of many researchers. Then, a visual attention guided patch-based image fusion method is proposed. The visual attention maps of the source images are calculated from the sparse represent coefficients of the source images. Then, the sparse coefficients are fused with the guidance of visual attention maps in order to emphasize the global “interesting” objects in the source images. Finally, the fused image is reconstructed from the fused sparse coefficients. The new fusion strategy ensures that the objects being “interesting” for our visual system are preserved in the fused image. The proposed approach is tested on infrared and visual, medical, and multi-focus images. The results compared with those of traditional methods show obvious improvement in objective and subjective quality measurements.