The bilateral solver for quality estimation based multi-focus image fusion

In this work, a fast Bilateral Solver for Quality Estimation Based multi-focus Image Fusion method (BS-QEBIF) is proposed. The all-in-focus image is generated by pixel-wise summing up the multi-focus source images with their focus-levels maps as weights. Since the visual quality of an image patch is highly correlated with its focus level, the focus-level maps are preliminarily obtained based on visual quality scores, as pre-estimations. However, the pre-estimations are not ideal. Thus the fast bilateral solver is then adopted to smooth the pre-estimations, and edges in the multi-focus source images can be preserved simultaneously. The edge-preserving smoothed results are utilized as final focus-level maps. Moreover, this work provides a confidence-map solution for the unstable fusion in the focus-level-changed boundary regions. Experiments were conducted on 25 pairs of source images. The proposed BS-QEBIF outperforms the other 13 fusion methods objectively and subjectively. The all-in-focus image produced by the proposed method can well maintain the details in the multi-focus source images and does not suffer from any residual errors. Experimental results show that BS-QEBIF can handle the focus-level-changed boundary regions without any blocking, ringing and blurring artifacts.