Efficient fusion scheme for multi-focus images by using blurring measure

In this paper, a simple and efficient multi-focus image fusion approach is proposed. As for the multi-focus images, all of them are obtained from the same scene with different focuses. So the images can be segmented into two kinds regions based on out of and on the focus, which directly leads to a region based fusion, i.e., finding out all of the regions on the focus from the source images, and merging them into a combination image. This poses the question of how to locate the regions on the focus from the input images. Considering that the details or scales are different in the regions which are not and on the focuses, blurring measure method in this paper is used to locate the regions based on the blocking degree. This new fusion method can significantly reduce the amount of distortion artifacts and the loss of contrast information. These are usually observed in fused images in the conventional fusion schemes. The fusion performance of proposed method has been evaluated through informal visual inspection and objective fusion performance measurements, and results show the advantages of the approach compared to conventional fusion approaches.