Image Fusion and Enhancement via Empirical Mode Decomposition

In this paper, we describe a novel technique for image fusion and enhancement, using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). EMD is a non-parametric data-driven analysis tool that decomposes non-linear non-stationary signals into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). In this method, we decompose images, rather than signals, from different imaging modalities into their IMFs. Fusion is performed at the decomposition level and the fused IMFs are reconstructed to realize the fused image. We have devised weighting schemes which emphasize features from both modalities by decreasing the mutual information between IMFs, thereby increasing the information and visual content of the fused image. We demonstrate how the proposed method improves the interpretive information of the input images, by comparing it with widely used fusion schemes. Apart from comparing our method with some advanced techniques, we have also evaluated our method against pixel-by-pixel averaging, a comparison, which incidentally, is not common in the literature.