Image fusion is a concept of combining multiple images into composite products,
through which more information than that of individual input images can be revealed.
It is of great importance in many applications, such as medicine, object detection, ATR,
remote sensing, computer vision and robotics. With the rapid growth of advance image
processing methodology and availability of a variety of sensors, the idea of combining
images has become important and has emerged as a new promising research area.
At present, a wide variety of data acquisition devices are available, and hence image
fusion has become an important sub-area of image processing. There are sensors which
cannot generate images of all objects at various distances with equal clarity. Thus,
several images of a scene are captured with the focus on the different parts of the scene.
The acquired images are complementary in many ways and a single one of them is not
sufficient in terms of their respective information content. However, viewing a series of
such images separately and individually is not very useful and convenient. The
advantages of multi-focus data can be fully exploited by integrating the images. Before
integrating, one must bring the constituent images to a common coordinate system.
Enough research has been done in the area of image registration, which is a process
of spatial alignment.
|
