A variational driven optimization framework for pansharpening of multispectral images

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pansharpening is an established remote sensing image fusion technique that yields a high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) image. Despite the fact that the advanced technologies like sparse coding and deep learning have achieved a remarkable improvement in solving the pansharpening problem, a unified model is required to further enhance the fusion quality. The variational optimisation (VO) mechanism has gained interest of most of the researchers in recent years. In this article, pansharpening is designated as a constrained optimisation problem with a data generative term and two regularisers to ameliorate spatial details and spectral information. The gradient information is exploited to impart the spatial details from the panchromatic image to the fused image. The correlation among multispectral image bands inspired to promote the spectral quality of the HRMS image as well as to reduce the distortion. Consequently, the optimisation problem is efficiently solved for the required HRMS image using the operator splitting approach. The extensive experiments performed in accordance with the well-known protocols rationalise that the proposed model outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of objective metrics and visual outcomes.