Multi-Exposure and Multi-Focus Image Fusion in Gradient Domain

• Published in: Journal of circuits, systems, and computers Vol. 25; no. 10; p. 1650123
• Main Authors: Paul, Sujoy, Sevcenco, Ioana S., Agathoklis, Panajotis
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore World Scientific Publishing Company 01.10.2016; World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte., Ltd
• Subjects: Algorithms; Color imagery; Computer vision; Exposure; Image processing; Image reconstruction; Wavelet analysis; Multi-focus image fusion; gradient domain image fusion; multi-exposure image fusion; image reconstruction from gradients
• ISSN: 0218-1266; 1793-6454
• DOI: 10.1142/S0218126616501231

A multi-exposure and multi-focus image fusion algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is developed for color images and is based on blending the gradients of the luminance components of the input images using the maximum gradient magnitude at each pixel location and then obtaining the fused luminance using a Haar wavelet-based image reconstruction technique. This image reconstruction algorithm is of O ( N ) complexity and includes a Poisson solver at each resolution to eliminate artifacts that may appear due to the nonconservative nature of the resulting gradient. The fused chrominance, on the other hand, is obtained as a weighted mean of the chrominance channels. The particular case of grayscale images is treated as luminance fusion. Experimental results and comparison with other fusion techniques indicate that the proposed algorithm is fast and produces similar or better results than existing techniques for both multi-exposure as well as multi-focus images.