1

MEDICAL IMAGE FUSION BASED ON COMBINED UDWT AND PCA

Reena Benjamin.Ja,Dr.T.Jayasreeb
a

Narayanaguru Siddhartha College of Engineering, Padanthalumoodu

b

Government College of Engineering, Tirunelveli.

Abstract-This paper presents fusion of biomedical images based on UDWT and PCA which
aims to integrate the complementary information from multimodal images providing more
information than any of the individual input images. The combination of UDWT and PCA
reduces the redundancy and removes artifacts. The images are fused by applying a specific
fusion rule to improve the image contents. Experimental result shows that our fusion
method gives better performance than existing methods.
Key Words: UDWT, PCA, Entropy, PSNR, Standard Deviation.
I. INTRODUCTION
The common imaging modalities used in medical field are Computed Tomography (CT),
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) etc. CT gives details
about bone structures and does not give information about the soft tissues. But MRI gives
information about soft tissues. The fusion of CT and MRI images provide information about both
bone structures and tissues [1]-[3]. The two approaches to image fusion are Spatial Fusion (SF)
and Transform Fusion (TF).
Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is one of the image fusion methods due to its
simplicity [4]-[7]. But it has some drawbacks namely Shift variance, limited directionality and
absence of phase information. Shift variance can be overcome by the introduction of
Undecimated Wavelet Transform (UDWT). One of the spatial fusion methods is Principal

Component Analysis (PCA) [8]-[11]. Image fusion based on PCA improves the resolution of
images and reduces the redundancy of the image [12]-[[14].Thus UDWT and PCA are combined
in order to increase the contrast and morphological details of an image.
II. IMAGE FUSION BASED ON UDWT AND PCA
The input source images are first decomposed using UDWT. The resultant coefficients
are applied with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by a fusion rule. PCA is an
orthogonal transform and it reduces the redundancy in both the input images. In the next step,
the final image is reconstructed using inverse UDWT.

Input
Image(MRI))

UDWT

PCA

TT

Inverse
Fusion Rule

Input
Image(CT)

UDWT

UDWT

Fused
Image

PCA

Fig.1. Block diagram of proposed image fusion methodology

1. Decomposition using UDWT: The input source images using Undecimated Wavelet
Transform (UDWT) using the following equations [15].
Approximation Coefficients: 1(x, y) = (x) (y)

(1)

Vertical Coefficients: 2(x, y) = (x) (y)

(2)

Horizontal Coefficients: 3 (x, y) = (x) (y)

(3)

Diagonal Coefficients: 4 (x, y) = (x) (y)

(4)

where, (x) is the wavelet function and (x) is the scaling function.
2. Principal Component Analysis (PCA):
PCA is a unique technique in which number of correlated variables is transformed into
number of uncorrelated variables called principal components. The weights for each source
image are obtained from the eigenvector corresponding to the largest Eigen value of the
covariance matrices of each source [16]-[17]. The PCA based image fusion consists of the
following steps:
(a) Arrange the two input images in two column vector. Let S be the resulting column
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)

vector of dimension 2 n .
Compute the empirical mean M along each column.
Obtain the difference between the mean and S producing the resultant matrix X.
Find the covariance matrix C of matrix X.
C= XXT
(5)
Compute the eigen vectors V and eigen values D of the covariance matrix C and

sort the eigen values in decreasing order.

(f) Consider first column of V which corresponds to larger eigen value to compute
normalized component P1 and P2.
P1= V1 / V
P2= V2 / V
(g) If the input images are I1(x ,y) and I2(x ,y),then the fused image is given by
If (x ,y) = P1 (x ,y) + P2(x ,y)

(6)
(7)
(8)

(h) Then the fused image is obtained using inverse UDWT.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The input images of the human brain under different modalities (MRI and CT) are shown
in fig 2(a) and (b). These images are fused using the advanced multistage decomposition

technique as discussed in this section. The simulation results show that the fused image gives
more information than any one of the input source images. Our present work (i.e.) the
combination of UDWT and PCA for image fusion is compared with other existing image fusion
methods. The performance is studied using different performance metrics such as Entropy (E),
Standard Deviation (SD) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).

(a)MRI image

(b) CT

image
Fig.2. Input images of different modalities
Input images from different modalities are shown in figure 2. Fig 2(a) represents input
MRI image.Fig 2(b) represents CT image in which the brighter or the white portion of the image
represents the presence of denser matter. First the input images are decomposed using UDWT.
Then the approximation as well as detail coefficients of both decomposed images are fused using
PCA. Next the images are reconstructed using inverse UDWT. Then the performance metrics are
calculated using Entropy(E),Standard Deviation(S.D) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR).

(a)

DWT

(b) PCA

(c) UDWT
d) DWT+PCA (e) UDWT+PCA
Fig. 3 Comparison of fused images
Fig.3 represents that the visual information in the pixels of the fused image using

the proposed method is more than that of the other fusion methods. The quality of the
fused image is analyzed by utilizing suitable objective quality metrics such as Entropy,
PSNR and Standard Deviation. Table I shows the comparison results of the different
fusion methods. It is found that the value of Entropy, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR)
and Standard Deviation is high for the proposed method. This signifies that the resultant
fused image obtained using the proposed technique provides more average information.
IV.PERFORMANCE METRICS
L1

(a) Entropy (E) = -

P
i=0

log Pi

(10)

Higher value of entropy indicates more amount of information in fused image.

(b) PSNR (dB) = 10 log10 (255)2 / MSE
(11)
Higher value indicates better signal to noise ratio in the fused image.
1

f ( n ,m ) ) 2 1/2
(c) Standard Deviation (SD) = { mn (
}
(12)
Higher value of standard deviation indicates better image quality.
TABLE I COMPARISON OF VARIOUS FUSION METHODS USING
FUSION METRICS
Metrics
Fusion Methods
DWT
PCA
UDWT
DWT+PCA
UDWT+PCA

Entropy
6.5772
6.4789
6.6702
6.7504
7.0

PSNR
11.1502
18.4629
12.6155
12.6347
19.2504

Standard Deviation
46.8209
46.2498
48.3422
91.6613
95.7227

Experimental outcomes illustrates that the proposed methodology performs better

than conventional multiscale transforms.
V.CONCLUSION

A fusion method based on the combination of UDWT and PCA is presented in

this paper. It overcomes the limitations of other image fusion methods. Our proposed
fusion methodology improves information content, PSNR and Standard Deviation. It also
preserves edges more effectively than other methods.
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