  An image fusion method based on salient features is proposed in this paper.
In this work, we have concentrated on salient features of the image for fusion
in order to preserve all relevant information contained in the input images and
tried to enhance the contrast in fused image and also suppressed noise to a
maximum extent. In our system, first we have applied a mask on two input images
in order to conserve the high frequency information along with some low
frequency information and stifle noise to a maximum extent. Thereafter, for
identification of salience features from sources images, a local moment is
computed in the neighborhood of a coefficient. Finally, a decision map is
generated based on local moment in order to get the fused image. To verify our
proposed algorithm, we have tested it on 120 sensor image pairs collected from
Manchester University UK database. The experimental results show that the
proposed method can provide superior fused image in terms of several
quantitative fusion evaluation index.
