Image fusion is a research topic about combining information from multiple images into one fused image. Although a large number of methods have been proposed, many challenges remain in obtaining clearer resulting images with higher quality. This chapter addresses the multifocus image fusion problem about extending the depth of field by fusing several images of the same scene with different focuses. Existing research in multifocus image fusion tends to emphasis on the pixel-level image fusion using transform domain methods. The region-level image fusion methods, especially the ones using new coding techniques, are still limited. In this chapter, we provide an overview of regional multi-focus image fusion, and two different orthogonal matching pursuit-based sparse representation methods are adopted for regional multi-focus image fusion. Experiment results show that the regional image fusion using sparse representation can achieve a comparable even better performance for multifocus image fusion problems.
Part of the book: Recent Advances in Image and Video Coding