An Objective Non-Reference Metric Based on Arimoto Entropy for Assessing the Quality of Fused Images

In the technologies, increasing attention is being paid to image fusion; nevertheless, how to objectively assess the quality of fused images and the performance of different fusion algorithms is of significance. In this paper, we propose a novel objective non-reference measure for evaluating image fusion. This metric employs the properties of Arimoto entropy, which is a generalization of Shannon entropy, measuring the amount of information that the fusion image contains about two input images. Preliminary experiments on multi-focus images and multi-modal images using the average fusion algorithm, contrast pyramid, principal component analysis, laplacian pyramid, guided filtering and discrete cosine transform have been implemented. In addition, a comparison has been conducted with other relevant quality metrics of image fusion such as mutual information, normalized mutual information, Tsallis divergence and the Petrovic measure. The experimental results illustrate that our presented metric correlates better with the subjective criteria of these fused images.