FCFusion: Fractal Componentwise Modeling With Group Sparsity for Medical Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion is the process of combing relevant biological information that can be used for automated industrial application. In this article, we present a novel framework combining fractal constraint with group sparsity to achieve the optimal fusion quality. First, we adopt the idea of patch division and componentwise separation to perceive the fractal characteristics across multimodality sources. Then, to preserve the spatial information against the redundancy of component-entanglement, the group sparsity is proposed. A dual variable weighting rule is inherently embedded to mitigate the overfitting across the component penalty. Furthermore, the alternating direction method of multipliers is conducted to the proposed model optimization. The experiments show that our model has a better performance in quantitative visual quality and qualitative evaluation analysis. Finally, a real segmentation application of positron emission tomography/computed tomography image fusion proves the effectiveness of our algorithm.