A MICRO-IMAGE FUSION ALGORITHM BASED ON REGION GROWING

Due to the limitation of Depth Of Field （DOF） of microscope, the regions which are not within the DOF will be blurring after imaging. Thus for micro-image fusion, the most important step is to identify the blurring regions within each micro-image, so as to remove their undesirable impacts on the fused image. In this paper, a fusion algorithm based on a novel region growing method is proposed for micro-image fusion. The local sharpness of micro-image is judged block by block, then blocks whose sharpness is lower than an adaptive threshold are used as seeds, and the sharpness of neighbors of each seed are evaluated again during the region growing until the blurring regions are identified completely. With the decreasing in block size, the obtained region segmentation becomes more and more accurate. Finally, the micro-images are fused with pixel-wise fusion rules. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm benefits from the novel region segmentation and it is able to obtain fused mi- cro-image with higher sharpness compared with some popular image fusion method.