Autofocusing panoramic radiographic image by all-in-focus image fusion

Digital panoramic radiographic imaging is routinely used by radiologists to assess the structural information about the patient. To minimize the inconvenience to the patient during the image acquisition and to complement for the imperfection of imaging systems, attempts have been made to generate several panoramic radiographic images at a time, each with different focus area. However, this leads to the inconveniences for the radiologists in exploring many panoramic radiographic images at a time. In this paper, we propose to do "autofocus" image fusion by computing an all-in-focus panoramic image from those panoramic radiographic images. This is to ensure the only one all-in-focus panoramic radiographic image is showed to the radiologists. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in producing the only one all-in-focus panoramic radiographic image, easing manufacturers, radiographers and radiologists from manually selecting the optimal image to be used in clinical assessment.