Multifocus image fusion using structure-preserving filter

A spatial domain multifocus image fusion method is proposed using a structure-preserving filter. In particular, the latest recursive filter (RF) is introduced as the structure-preserving filter in the proposed spatial domain method. Moreover, a focused region detection method is presented to determine initial weight maps based on an average low-pass filter. Then a fused image can be generated by the final weight maps, which are obtained using the RF to refine the initial weight maps and can well preserve the structures of source images. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art multifocus fusion methods in terms of subjective and objective evaluation.