Image Fusion Algorithm Based on Spatial Frequency-Motivated Pulse Coupled Neural Networks in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform Domain

摘要

Nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) provides °exible multiresolution, anisotropy and directional expansion for images. Compared with the original contourlet transform, it is shift-invariant and can overcome the pseudo-Gibbs phenomena around singularities. Pulse Coupled Neural Networks (PCNN) is a visual cortex-inspired neural network and characterized by the global coupling and pulse synchronization of neurons. It has been proven suitable for image processing and successfully employed in image fusion. In this paper, NSCT is associated with PCNN and employed in image fusion to make full use of the characteristics of them. Spatial frequency in NSCT domain is input to motivate PCNN and coe±cients in NSCT domain with large firing times are selected as coe±cients of the fused image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms typical wavelet-based, contourlet-based, PCNN-based and contourlet-PCNN-based fusion algorithms in term of objective criteria and visual appearance.