Implementation and Comparative Study of Pyramid-based Image Fusion Techniques for Lumbar Spine Images

Image fusion is a method of combining the necessary and relevant information from the set of source images into a single (fused) image which can be deemed to be more informative than the source. This paper discusses the implementation of various pyramid-based image fusion algorithms, such as the Laplacian pyramid, the ratio of the low-pass pyramid, the contrast pyramid, and the filter subtract decimate pyramid on multimodal CT and MR images of the lumbar spine. The fused images were evaluated using various objective evaluation quality metrics. The experimental results demonstrated that the ratio of the low pass pyramid achieved better performance compared to the other pyramids implemented, indicating that the fused image can also be used for further image fusion application or analysis purposes.