MCRD-Net: An unsupervised dense network with multi-scale convolutional block attention for multi-focus image fusion

Multi-focus image fusion technology solves the problem of limited depth of field of the optical lens. It can extract different focus parts under the same target to synthesize a full-focus image. This paper proposes an unsupervised dense network for multi-focus image fusion. In the network, a multi-scale feature extraction module is employed to extract the spatial details of source images from different scales, and a convolutional block attention module is used to select the useful deep features, and a residual module is used to effectively optimize the performance of the network. By introducing these three modules, the proposed network can effectively extract the shallow and deep features of the source images. Besides, Gaussian-based Sum-Modified-Laplacian (GSML) is used to calculate the activity level of the feature map to generate a decision map. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed from two aspects: visual quality and objective metrics. Experimental results show that compared with nine image fusion methods, the performance of this algorithm is better.