A Novel Metric for Performance Evaluation of Image Fusion Algorithms

In this paper, we present a novel objective nonreference performance assessment algorithm for image fusion. It takes into account local measurements to estimate how well the important information in the source images is represented by the fused image. The metric is based on the Universal Image Quality Index and uses the similarity between blocks of pixels in the input images and the fused image as the weighting factors for the metrics. Experimental results confirm that the values of the proposed metrics correlate well with the subjective quality of the fused images, giving a significant improvement over standard measures based on mean squared error and mutual information.

• Nedeljko Cvejic
• Artur Łoza
• David Bull
• Nishan Canagarajah

• Fusion performance measures
• image fusion
• non-reference quality measures
• objective quality measures.

[1] H. Maitre and I. Bloch, "Image fusion", Vistas in Astronomy, Vol. 41,
No. 3, pp. 329-335, 1997.
[2] S. Nikolov, P. Hill, D. Bull, and N. Canagarajah, "Wavelets for image
fusion", Wavelets in Signal and Image Analysis, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The
Netherlands, pp. 213-244, 2001.
[3] D. Ryan and R. Tinkler, "Night pilotage assessment of image fusion",
Proc. SPIE, Vol. 2465, Orlando, FL, pp. 50-67, 1995.
[4] A. Toet and E. M. Franken "Perceptual evaluation of different image
fusion schemes", Displays, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 25-37, 2003.
[5] G. Piella, "A general framework for multiresolution image fusion: from
pixels to regions", Information Fusion, Vol. 9, pp. 259-280, 2003.
[6] H. Li, B. S. Manjunath, and S. K. Mitra, "Multisensor image fusion
using the wavelet transform", Graphical Models and Image Processing,
Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 235-245, 1995.
[7] O. Rockinger, "Image sequence fusion using a shift invariant wavelet
transform. Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing,
Washington, DC, pp. 288-291, 1997.
[8] C. Xydeas and V. Petrovic "Objective pixel-level image fusion
performance measure", In Proc. SPIE, Vol. 4051, Orlando, FL, pp. 88-
99, 2000
[9] G. H. Qu, D. L. Zhang, and P. F. Yan "Information measure for
performance of image fusion", Electronics Letters, Vol. 38, No. 7, pp.
313-315, 2002.
[10] Z. Wang and A. C. Bovik. "A universal image quality index" IEEE
Signal Processing Letters, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 81-84, 2002.
[11] G. Piella and H. Heijmans, "A new quality metric for image fusion" In
Proc. Int. Conf. Image Processing, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 173-6, 2003.