A better method for SAR image and multi-spectral image fusion based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and genetic algorithm

SAR image or multispectral image has big difference in imaging mechanism and spectral characteristics. Sections 1 and 2 of the full paper explain our image fusion method mentioned in the title, which we believe is new and better than previous ones. Their cpre consists of: (1) by using the multi-scale, multi-direction ad spare decomposition capability of the NSCT, we transform the SAR and multispectral source images into NSCT domain; (2) we fuse the low frequencey coefficients by maximizing the regional entropy; then we calculate the values of the highfrequence subband regional correlation coefficients, divide them into different ranges according to the threshold values selected by genetic algorithm and fuse the correlation coefficients in different ranges, (3) we take the inverse NSCT transform, thus obtatining the fused images. Section 3 simulates our image fusion method; the simulation results, given in Fig. 4 and Table 1, and their analysis show preliminarily that our image fusion method performs indeed much better than the exsiting regional-based/pixel-based Contourlet/NSCT.