Medical Image Fusion Based on SWT and Cross Bilateral Filter

Image fusion is a process of combining relevant information from a different set of medical images into a single image. Multimodal medical image fusion techniques are used to improve the quality of a fused image. The cross bilateral filter (CBF) is an edge-preserving filter to highlight the edge's information in a fused image used for better analysis. In this paper, SWT and cross bilateral filter-based medical image fusion is proposed. Firstly, the input images are decomposed into a frequency coefficient using stationary wavelet transform. Secondly, the low coefficients are fused by CBF and high coefficients are fused with maximum fusion rules. Thirdly, the fused image is obtained by reconstruction process. This proposed method is superior to the conventional CBF method in terms of visualization and quality. The proposed method is evaluated by quality parameters such as mean (M), standard deviation (STD), and entropy (E).