Medical Image Fusion Based on Local Saliency Energy and Multi-scale Fractal Dimension

Background At present, there are some problems in multimodal medical image fusion, such as texture detail loss, leading to edge contour blurring and image energy loss, leading to contrast reduction.Objective To solve these problems and obtain higher-quality fusion images, this study proposes an image fusion method based on local saliency energy and multi-scale fractal dimension.Methods First, by using a non-subsampled contourlet transform, the medical image was divided into 4 layers of high-pass subbands and 1 layer of low-pass subband. Second, in order to fuse the high-pass subbands of layers 2 to 4, the fusion rules based on a multi-scale morphological gradient and an activity measure were used as external stimuli in pulse coupled neural network. Third, a fusion rule based on the improved multi-scale fractal dimension and new local saliency energy was proposed, respectively, for the low-pass subband and the 1st closest to the low-pass subband. Layer-high pass sub-bands were fused. Lastly, the fused image was created by performing the inverse non-subsampled contourlet transform on the fused sub-bands.Results On three multimodal medical image datasets, the proposed method was compared with 7 other fusion methods using 5 common objective evaluation metrics.Conclusion Experiments showed that this method can protect the contrast and edge of fusion image well and has strong competitiveness in both subjective and objective evaluation.