Image decomposition is crucial for many image processing tasks, as it allows
to extract salient features from source images. A good image decomposition
method could lead to a better performance, especially in image fusion tasks. We
propose a multi-level image decomposition method based on latent low-rank
representation(LatLRR), which is called MDLatLRR. This decomposition method is
applicable to many image processing fields. In this paper, we focus on the
image fusion task. We develop a novel image fusion framework based on MDLatLRR,
which is used to decompose source images into detail parts(salient features)
and base parts. A nuclear-norm based fusion strategy is used to fuse the detail
parts, and the base parts are fused by an averaging strategy. Compared with
other state-of-the-art fusion methods, the proposed algorithm exhibits better
fusion performance in both subjective and objective evaluation.Comment: IEEE Trans. Image Processing 2020, 14 pages, 17 figures, 3 table
