A new image quality metric for image fusion: The sum of the correlations of differences

Measuring the quality of fused images is a very important stage for image fusion applications. The fused image must comprise maximum information from each of source images of the same scene taken by different sensors. Therefore, the amount of the information gathered in the fused images reflects the quality of them. This paper proposes a new quality metric by making use of this knowledge. The metric employed to compare the performance of different image fusion algorithms. In the experiments, subjective correspondence of the proposed metric and several well-known metrics are compared. Experimental results show the feasibility of the developed metric.