Multimodal Medical Image Fusion in Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform Domain

Abstract

Multimodal medical image fusion is a powerful tool for diagnosing diseases in medical field. The main objective is to capture the relevant information from input images into a single output image, which plays an important role in clinical applications. In this paper, an image fusion technique for the fusion of multimodal medical images is proposed based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform. The proposed technique uses the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) to decompose the images into lowpass and highpass subbands. The lowpass and highpass subbands are fused by using mean based and variance based fusion rules. The reconstructed image is obtained by taking Inverse Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (INSCT) on fused subbands. The experimental results on six pairs of medical images are compared in terms of entropy, mean, standard deviation, Q AB/F as performance parameters. It reveals that the proposed image fusion technique outperforms the existing image fusion techniques in terms of quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the images. The percentage improvement in entropy is 0% - 40%, mean is 3% - 42%, standard deviation is 1% - 42%, Q AB/F is 0.4% - 48% in proposed method comparing to conventional methods for six pairs of medical images.