doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2006.09.001
Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
A novel similarity based quality metric for image fusion
Cui Yang
, a,
, Jian-Qi Zhanga, Xiao-Rui Wanga and Xin Liua
aSchool of Technical Physics, Xidian University, Xi’an shaanxi, 710071, People’s Republic of China
Received 28 November 2005;
revised 15 September 2006;
accepted 15 September 2006.
Available online 30 October 2006.
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Abstract
A novel objective quality metric for image fusion is presented. The interest of our metric lies in the fact that the redundant regions and the complementary/conflicting regions are treated respectively according to the structural similarity between the source images. The experiments show that the proposed measure is consistent with human visual evaluations and can be applied to evaluate image fusion schemes that are not performed at the same level.
Keywords: Image fusion; Objective performance evaluation; Structural similarity
Fig. 1. One example of the source images to be fused from the ‘UN camp’ sequence set: (a) Infrared image and (b) visual image, and the fused image obtained by different image fusion schemes: (c) Laplacian pyramid (d) DWT (e) ratio pyramid and (f) average.
Fig. 2. The evaluation results for all the 32 sets by (a) Mutual Information, (b) the Qw method and (c) the method proposed in this paper.
Fig. 3. Blurred and salt and pepper noise added source images: (a) source image x and (b) source image y, and the fused images obtained by different image fusion schemes: (c) Laplacian pyramid (d) DWT (e) ratio pyramid and (f) average.
Table 1.
Comparison between different quality measures for the fused images in Fig. 1

Table 2.
Comparison between different quality measures for the fused images in Fig. 3
