Neighbour Local Variability for Multi-Focus Images Fusion

Abstract

The goal of multi-focus image fusion is to integrate images with different focus objects in order to obtain a single image with all focus objects. In this paper, we give a new method based on neighbour local variability (NLV) to fuse multi-focus images. At each pixel, the method uses the local variability calculated from the quadratic difference between the value of the pixel and the value of all pixels in its neighbourhood. It expresses the behaviour of the pixel with respect to its neighbours. The variability preserves the edge function because it detects the sharp intensity of the image. The proposed fusion of each pixel consists of weighting each pixel by the exponential of its local variability. The quality of this fusion depends on the size of the neighbourhood region considered. The size depends on the variance and the size of the blur filter. We start by modelling the value of the neighbourhood region size as a function of the variance and the size of the blur filter. We compare our method to other methods given in the literature. We show that our method gives a better result.