On the use of a joint spatial-frequency representation for the fusion of multi-focus images

This paper shows practical examples of the application of a new image fusion paradigm for achieving a 2-D all in-focus image starting from a set of multi-focus images of a 3-D real object. The goal consists in providing an enhanced 2-D image showing the object entirely in focus. The fusion procedure shown here is based on the use of a focusing pixel-level measure. Such measure is defined in the space-frequency domain through a 1-D pseudo-Wigner distribution. The method is illustrated with different sets of images. Evaluation measures applied to artificially blurred cut and pasted regions have shown that the present scheme can provide equally or even better performance than other alternative image fusion algorithms. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported by the following grants: TEC2004-00834; the IM3 medical imaging thematic network from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III and the bilateral project: 2004CZ0009 CSIC-Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. We thank to Leon Cohen and Lorenzo Galleani for fruitful discussions.Peer Reviewe