Image Fusion Techniques: A Survey

The necessity of image fusion is growing in recently in image processing applications due to the tremendous amount of acquisition systems. Fusion of images is defined as an alignment of noteworthy Information from diverse sensors using various mathematical models to generate a single compound image. The fusion of images is used for integrating the complementary multi-temporal, multi-view and multi-sensor Information into a single image with improved image quality and by keeping the integrity of important features. It is considered as a vital pre-processing phase for several applications such as robot vision, aerial, satellite imaging, medical imaging, and a robot or vehicle guidance. In this paper, various state-of-art image fusion methods of diverse levels with their pros and cons, various spatial and transform based method with quality metrics and their applications in different domains have been discussed. Finally, this review has concluded various future directions for different applications of image fusion.