A survey on region based image fusion methods

Image fusion has been emerging as an important area of research. It has attracted many applications such as surveillance, photography, medical diagnosis, etc. Image fusion techniques are developed at three levels: pixel, feature and decision. Region based image fusion is one of the methods of feature level. It possesses certain advantages - less sensitive to noise, more robust and avoids misregistration. This paper presents a review of region based fusion approaches. A first hand classification of region based fusion methods is carried out. A comprehensive list of objective fusion evaluation metrics is highlighted to compare the existing methods. A detailed analysis is carried out and results are presented in tabular form. This may attract researchers to further explore the research in this direction.