Simultaneous image fusion and denoising by using fractional-order gradient information

Image fusion and denoising are significant in image processing because of the availability of multi-sensor and the presence of the noise. The first-order and second-order gradient information have been effectively applied to deal with fusing the noise-free source images. In this paper, we utilize the fractional-order derivatives to represent image features, and propose two new convex variational models for fusing noisy source images. Furthermore, we apply an alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) to solve the minimization problems in the proposed models. Numerical experiments show that the proposed methods outperform the conventional total variation methods for simultaneously fusing and denoising. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.