Multifocus Image Fusion Report

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Image fusion is an image processing technique aims at generating a single sharper image by integrating the complementary and redundant information from the set of source images captured from the same scene with different focus points. The resulting fused image will be more suitable for human and machine processing than any individual source image for further image processing tasks. Due to the limited depth-of-focus of optical lenses, it is impossible to acquire an image where all the objects are in focus. Therefore Multifocus image fusion method is used to create a single image where all relevant objects are in focus.

1.1 Image Fusion Techniques

Image fusion takes place at three different levels i.e. pixel, feature and

However in practice this may not be always feasible as optical lenses suffer from the problem of limited depth of field. According to the lens formula, only objects at one particular depth will be truly in focus. Consequently, if one object in the scene is in focus, another object at a different distance from the lens will be out of focus and thus blurred. Therefore the Multifocus image fusion technique is desirable to create a single image where all objects are in focus. Then the composite image will be more suitable for human perception and machine processing than any individual source image.

1.4 Problem Statement

The main task of this project is to identify focused regions within each source image and eventually combine these objects in focus into a single image and another problem is the blocking artifacts in the fused image caused during the block size selection. In many cases images are corrupted with some noises, it hides the important details of images and thus it reduces the quality of the image. To enhance the image qualities, removal of noises from the images without loss of any image information is very important.

1.5