Biological image fusion using a NSCT based variable-weight method

Biological image fusion, as a powerful tool for the protein study, has developed with the advent of various imaging modalities in molecular biology. Combining the fluorescent image and its corresponding phase contrast image will benefit the localization of the protein. However, resulting images of traditional methods are always difficult to compromise between multimodalities. This paper has solved this problem by a variable-weight fusion rule based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The intensity components of original images are combined in the multiscaled space and the fused image is obtained in the generalized intensity-hue-saturation (GIHS) frame. Validation experiments on 117 sets of Arabidopsis images are for two purposes: the comparison among different fusion rules and the impact of the multiscaled analysis in biological image fusion. Region-based quantified indexes reveal the similarity between fused images and original ones, and therefore demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over traditional methods. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.