An efficient medical image fusion method using contourlet transform based on PCM

An efficient medical image fusion method has been proposed based on contourlet transform and multi fusion rules. The multimodal medical images were first decomposed using the contourlet transform then fusion rules were applied to low frequency components and high frequency components of contourlet coefficients. For low frequency components principle component analysis (PCA) method was adopted. While for high frequency components region based contourlet contrast was adopted. The final fusion image is obtained by directly applying inverse contourlet transform to the fused low and high frequency components. Using four image quality indicators experimental results showed that the proposed method give extensive fused image on multimodality CT/MRI.