Multifocus color image fusion based on quaternion curvelet transform

Multifocus color image fusion is an active research area in image processing, and many fusion algorithms have been developed. However, the existing techniques can hardly deal with the problem of image blur. This study present a novel fusion approach that integrates the quaternion with traditional curvelet transform to overcome the above disadvantage. The proposed method uses a multiresolution analysis procedure based on the quaternion curvelet transform. Experimental results show that the proposed method is promising, and it does significantly improve the fusion quality compared to the existing fusion methods. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America