Regional energy weighting image Fusion algorithm by wavelet based contourlet transform

In order to reduce the redundancy of Laplacian pyramids decomposing in contourlet transform (CT). An image fusion algorithm is proposed with the wavelet based contourlet transform (WBCT). By employing different masks, the algorithm integrates the approximation coefficients and the detail coefficients differently according to the weights, which are calculated with the energy of the corresponding neighbor region of the WBCT coefficients. Evaluation of the experimental results according to both the subjective and objective criteria, including the average, mean square error, entropy and cross entropy, it is demonstrated that algorithms based on WBCT are more effective than the ones based on CT with the same fusion rules, and that the fusion rule based on different masks can attain better results than the ones of average mask and traditional method.