INTRODUCTION
Image fusion is the process by which two or more images are combined intoa single image retaining the important features from each of the original images.The fusion of images is often required for images acquired from differentinstrument modalities or capture techniques of the same scene or objects.Important applications of the fusion of images include medical imaging,microscopic imaging, remote sensing, computer vision, and robotics. Fusiontechniques include the simplest method of pixel averaging to more complicatedmethods such as principal component analysis and wavelet transform fusion.Several approaches to image fusion can be distinguished, depending on whether the images are fused in the spatial domain or they are transformed into another domain, and their transforms fused.With the development of new imaging sensors arises the need of ameaningful combination of all employed imaging sources. The actual fusionprocess can take place at different levels of information representation, a genericcategorization is to consider the different levels as, sorted in ascending order of abstraction: signal, pixel, feature and symbolic level. This focuses on the so-calledpixel level fusion process, where a composite image has to be built of several inputimages. To date, the result of pixel level image fusion is considered primarily to bepresented to the human observer, especially in image sequence fusion (where theinput data consists of image sequences). A possible
is the fusion of forward looking infrared (FLIR) and low light visible images (LLTV) obtained by anairborne sensor platform to aid a pilot navigate in poor weather conditions or darkness. In pixel-level image fusion, some generic requirements can be imposedon the fusion result. The fusion process should preserve all relevant information of the input imagery in the composite image (pattern conservation) The fusionscheme should not introduce any artifacts or inconsistencies which would distractthe human observer or following processing stages .The fusion process should beshift and rotational invariant, i.e. the fusion result should not depend on thelocation or orientation of an object the input imagery .In case of image sequencefusion arises the additional problem of temporal stability and consistency of thefused image sequence. The human visual system is primarily sensitive to moving
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light stimuli, so moving artifacts or time depended contrast changes introduced bythe fusion process are highly distracting to the human observer. So, in case of image sequence fusion the two additional requirements apply. Temporal stability:The fused image sequence should be temporal stable, i.e. gray level changes inthe fused sequence must only be caused by gray level changes in the inputsequences, they must not be introduced by the fusion scheme itself; Temporalconsistency: Gray level changes occurring in the input sequences must be presentin the fused sequence without any delay or contrast change.
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FUSION METHODS
1.1.1Introduction
The following summarize several approaches to the pixel level fusion of spatially registered input images. Most of these methods have been developed for the fusion of stationary input images (such as multispectral satellite imagery). Dueto the static nature of the input data, temporal aspects arising in the fusion processof image sequences, e.g. stability and consistency, are not addressed.A generic categorization of image fusion methods is the following:
linear superposition
nonlinear methods
optimization approaches
artificial neural networks
image pyramids
wavelet transform
generic multiresolution fusion scheme
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1.1.2Linear Superposition
The probably most straightforward way to build a fused image of severalinput frames is performing the fusion as a weighted superposition of all inputframes.The optimal weighting coefficients, with respect to information content andredundancy removal, can be determined by a principal component analysis (PCA)of all input intensities. By performing a PCA of the covariance matrix of inputintensities, the weightings for each input frame are obtained from the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue.A similar procedure is the linear combination of all inputs in a pre-chosencolorspace (eg. R-G-B or H-S-V), leading to a false color representation of thefused image.
1.1.3Nonlinear Methods
Another simple approach to image fusion is to build the fused image by theapplication of a simple nonlinear operator such as max or min. If in all input imagesthe bright objects are of interest, a good choice is to compute the fused image byan pixel-by-pixel application of the maximum operator.An extension to this approach follows by the introduction of morphologicaloperators such as opening or closing. One application is the use of conditionalmorphological operators by the definition of highly reliable 'core' features presentin both images and a
set of 'potential' features present only in one source, wherethe actual fusion process is performed by the application of conditional erosion anddilation operators.A further extension to this approach is image algebra, which is a high-levelalgebraic extension of image morphology, designed to describe all imageprocessing operations. The basic types defined in image algebra are value sets,coordinate sets which allow the integration of different resolutions andtessellations, images and templates. For each basic type binary and unaryoperations are defined which reach from the basic set operations to more complex
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