Image processing techniques primarily focus upon enhancing the quality of an image
or a set of images and to derive the maximum information from them. Image Fusion is
such a technique of producing a superior quality image from a set of available images.
It is the process of combining relevant information from two or more images into a
single image wherein the resulting image will be more informative and complete than
any of the input images. A lot of research is being done in this field encompassing
areas of Computer Vision, Automatic object detection, Image processing, parallel and
distributed processing, Robotics and remote sensing. This paper reports a detailed
study performed over a set of image fusion algorithms regarding their
implementation. The paper explains the theoretical and implementation issues of the
efficient image fusion algorithms considered and the experimental results of the same.
The fusion algorithms were assessed based on the study and development of some
image quality metrics. Reported is the study and implementation of image quality
metrics that were developed for assessing the image fusion algorithms implemented.
The experimental results have been discussed in detail and the inference thus arrived
at.
The paper, in the later section describes about the image fusion toolkit called Wavelet
Fusion and Laplacian Fusion, developed using MATLAB, providing a graphical user
interface for the same. A description is provided about the usage of the toolkit in order
to fuse the set of input images using the various image fusion algorithms.