FUSESHARP: A MULTI-IMAGE FOCUS FUSION METHOD USING DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM AND UNSHARP MASKING

In this paper, a novel hybrid method for multi-focus image fusion is proposed. The method combines the advantages of wavelet transform-based methods and focus-measure-based methods to achieve an improved fusion result. The input images are first decomposed into different frequency sub-bands using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The focus measure of each sub-band is then calculated using the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) operator, and the sub-band with the highest focus measure is selected as the focused sub-band. The focused sub-band is sharpened using an unsharp masking filter to preserve the details in the focused part of the image.Finally, the sharpened focused sub-bands from all input images are fused using the maximum intensity fusion method to preserve the important information from all focus images. The proposed method has been evaluated using standard multi focus image fusion datasets and has shown promising results compared to existing methods.