Image fusion quality assessment based on discrete cosine transform and human visual system

With the rapid development of image fusion technology, image fusion quality evaluation plays a very important guiding role in selecting or designing image fusion algorithms. Objective image quality assessment is an interesting research subject in the field of image quality assessment. The ideal objective evaluation method is consistent with human perceptual evaluation. A new fusion image quality assessment method according with human vision system and discrete cosine transform (DCT) is introduced. Firstly, using the Sobel operator to calculate to gradient images for the source images and fused image, the gradient images are divided into 8 x 8 blocks and calculating the DCT coefficients for each block, and then based on the characteristics of human visual system, calculates the luminance masking, contrast masking to form the perceptual error matrix between input images and fused images. Finally, weighs the perceptual error matrix using the structural similarity. Experiments demonstrate that the new assessment maintains better consistency with human subjective perception. (C) 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.51.9.097002]