Multi-focus image fusion for visual sensor networks in DCT domain

The objective of image fusion is to combine relevant information from multiple images into a single image. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) based methods of image fusion are more efficient and time-saving in real-time systems using DCT based standards of still image or video. Existing DCT based methods are suffering from some undesirable side effects like blurring or blocking artifacts which reduce the quality of the output image. Furthermore, some of these methods are rather complex and this contradicts the concept of the simplicity of DCT based algorithms. In this paper, an efficient approach for fusion of multi-focus images based on variance calculated in DCT domain is presented. Due to simplicity of our proposed method, it can be easily used in real-time applications. The experimental results verify the efficiency improvement of our method both in output quality and complexity reduction in comparison with several recent proposed techniques. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.