Color Multi-Focus Image Fusion Method Based on Contourlet Transform

Color Multi-Focus Image Fusion (MFIF) technology finds extensive use in areas such as microscopy, astronomy, and multi-scene photography where high-quality and detailed images are vital. This paper presents the Contourlet Transform alongside its enhanced version, the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT), aimed at improving the outcomes of image fusion, with the support of Laplacian Pyramid (LP) decomposition. The NSCT framework overcomes challenges like spectral aliasing and directional sensitivity, leading to images with sharper edges, enriched texture details, and preserved delicate information. Experimental findings highlight the NSCT-based fusion algorithm's superiority. Subjective assessments indicate that using the NSCT method results in images with sharp and well-defined object boundaries, outstanding contrast, and abundant textures without the creation of artifacts, markedly excelling beyond traditional techniques such as the Contourlet Transform, Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) and Rolling Guidance Filtering (RGF). Objective measures verify its effectiveness: In the first dataset, it attains an average gradient (AG) of 8.36 and an edge intensity (EI) of 3.29E-04, while in the second dataset, it reports an AG of 21.39 and an EI of 4.06E-04, significantly outperforming other methods. Moreover, the NSCT method offers competitive computational speed, balancing runtime with high-quality fusion performance. These results establish the proposed method as a powerful and efficient solution for color MFIF, offering notable performance benefits and practical utility in various imaging fields.

@article{Cai2025,
  title     = {Color Multi-Focus Image Fusion Method Based on Contourlet Transform},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Zhifang Cai},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160281},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160281}
}