A multi-focus image fusion method based on attention mechanism and supervised learning

Multi-focus image fusion is always a difficult problem in digital image processing. To achieve efficient integration, we propose a new end-to-end network. This network uses the residual atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to extract multi-level features from the space of different scales and share parameters to ensure the consistency and correspondence of features. We also introduced a disparities attention module for the network which allows for information retention. These two parts can make our method overcome the difficulties of target edge artifacts, small range blur, poor detail capture, and so on. In addition, in order to improve the semantic ambiguity easily caused by unsupervised learning, we also proposed a new multi-focus image fusion dataset with groundtruth for supervised learning. We performed sufficient experiments, and the results show that the network can quickly capture the corresponding features of multi-focus images, and improve the fusion performance with less computation and lower storage cost. Compared with the existing nine fusion methods, our network is superior to other methods in subjective visual evaluation and objective evaluation, reaching a higher level.