Image fusion through local feature extraction by using multi-scale top-hat by reconstruction operators

The purpose of image fusion is to combine useful image features of different original images into the final fusion image, which will produce one useful result image for different applications. One of the main difficulties of image fusion is extracting useful image features of different original images. In some cases, useful image features are local image features of the whole image. To efficiently extract local image features and produce an efficient fusion result, an image fusion algorithm based on the extracted local image features by using multi-scale top-hat by reconstruction operators is proposed in this paper. Firstly, multi-scale local feature extraction using multi-scale top-hat by reconstruction operators is discussed. Then, based on the extracted multi-scale local features of different original images, the useful image features for image fusion are constructed. Finally, the constructed useful image features for image fusion are combined into the final fusion image. Experimental results on different types of images show that, the proposed algorithm performs well for image fusion.