A contrast based image fusion technique in the DCT domain

This paper studies image fusion techniques in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. A new image fusion technique based on a contrast measure defined in the DCT domain is presented. The performance of our contrast measure based technique is analyzed and compared with other image fusion techniques. Experimental results show that there is no difference in visual quality between the fused image obtained by our algorithm and that obtained by a wavelet transform based image fusion technique. But because our algorithm is carried out in the DCT domain, it is time-saving and simpler when the fused image needs to be saved or transmitted in JPEG format or when the images to be fused were saved in JPEG format. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.