Novel Fused Image Quality Measures Based on Structural Similarity

Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we present new approaches using structural similarity (SSIM) index for assessing grayscale fused image quality and color fusion method quality in image fusion. The advantages of grayscale fused image quality measure using SSIM are that the metric does not require a reference image and can be easily computed. The advantages of color fusion metric using SSIM are that it correlates strongly with human perception and can also be easily computed. Numerous simulations demonstrate that our measures conform to subjective evaluations and can be able to assess different image fusion methods.