A Novel Fusion Rule for Medical Image Fusion in Complex Wavelet Transform Domain

Medical image fusion is being used at large by clinical professionals for improved diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The main aim of image fusion process is to combine complete information from all input images into a single fused image. Therefore, a novel fusion rule is proposed for fusing medical images based on Daubechies complex wavelet transform (DCxWT). Input images are first decomposed using DCxWT. The complex coefficients so obtained are then fused using normalized correlation based fusion rule. Finally, the fused image is obtained by inverse DCxWT with all combined complex coefficients. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated and compared both visually and objectively with DCxWT based fusion methods using state-of art fusion rules as well as with existing fusion techniques. Experimental results and comparative study demonstrate that the proposed fusion technique generates better results than existing fusion rules as well as with other fusion techniques.