Pulse Coupled Neural Network-Based Multimodal Medical Image Fusion via Guided Filtering and WSEML in NSCT Domain

Multimodal medical image fusion aims to fuse images with complementary multisource information. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal medical image fusion method using pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) and a weighted sum of eight-neighborhood-based modified Laplacian (WSEML) integrating guided image filtering (GIF) in non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. Firstly, the source images are decomposed by NSCT, several low- and high-frequency sub-bands are generated. Secondly, the PCNN-based fusion rule is used to process the low-frequency components, and the GIF-WSEML fusion model is used to process the high-frequency components. Finally, the fused image is obtained by integrating the fused low- and high-frequency sub-bands. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performance in terms of multimodal medical image fusion. The proposed algorithm also has obvious advantages in objective evaluation indexes VIFF, Q_W, API, SD, EN and time consumption.