Abstract

  Image fusion is the technique of merging or combining two or more images to give a single image with enhanced information content. Most of the standalone image fusion techniques have their own advantages as well as disadvantages. So it is always desirable to pursue a combination of two or more techniques to give better results. The fusion technique employed is a combination of the existing Pyramid based fusion and Edge preserving smoothing filter based fusion rules. First an edge preserving smoothing filter such as Bilateral filter or Guided filter is used to obtain base and detail layers of the  input images. The base and detail layers are separately fused using Pyramid fusion rule. The fusion of base layers are controlled by a weighting factor which takes into consideration the exposure, contrast, and saturation measures of the input images. The fused base and detail layers are combined to give the final image. The work also gives a comparative study of the performance of the two common edge preserving smoothing filters - Bilateral filter and Guided filter. Commonly used Image quality metrics such as PSNR and SSIM are employed for analyzing the experimental results. An average PSNR value of 62.68 is obtained with Guided filter and 60.03 with Bilateral filter

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