Image Fusion using Variational Mode Decomposition

Background/Objectives: This paper introduced an image fusion algorithm based on Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD). Methods/Statistical Analysis: Image fusion is one of the image enhancement methods which results the image with better quality derived from a set of degraded images. Fused image contains more information than input images and it is efficient for visual perception and computer vision applications. This paper proposed an image fusion technique based on VMD for multi focus images. VMD has been a recently introduced non-recursive decomposition method, which decomposes the image into separate spectral bands called Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) or modes. The modes are generated with respect to the associated central frequencies and they are band limited. Findings: A fusion rule based on weighing scheme is performed at the decomposition level for increasing the features by decreasing the mutual information. The reconstruction of the IMFs results the final fused image. The performance analysis of the proposed fusion method is experimented using standard objective quality metrics. The efficiency of the proposed method is determined by comparing the method with some state of the art methods. Application/Improvements: The image fusion using VMD is applicable to multi-resolution, multi model multi-sensor images.