International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 43 - Number 19 |
Year of Publication: 2012 |
Authors: J. Alavandan, S. Santhosh Baboo |
10.5120/6212-8861 |
J. Alavandan, S. Santhosh Baboo . Performance Analysis of Image Fusion Tecniques for Sonar Image Enhancement. International Journal of Computer Applications. 43, 19 ( April 2012), 28-34. DOI=10.5120/6212-8861
SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging) is a technology that is used to observe Earth surfaces with focus on underwater applications like sea-bed imaging, depth sounding and fish-echolocation. The captured sonar images are often disturbed by various factors like the transmission of limited range of light, disturbance of lightening, low contrast and blurring of image, color diminishing during capturing and noise. These disturbances affect image quality which often lead to incorrect analysis and has to be handled carefully. To efficiently analyze an image, the quality of the image should be high standard and thus, enhancement of image quality has become imperative in image analysis systems. In this paper, two techniques, Laplacian Pyramid-based image fusion and Wavelet-based image fusion algorithms are considered and their applicability to fuse sonar images to construct an enhanced image is analyzed. The paper considers various pictures from single sensor and performance evaluation was performed in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Figure of Merit and Speed of algorithms. Experiments showed that wavelets produced fast and better quality images, while edges were better preserved by pixel-based algorithms.