Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radiometer image and Optical Data Fusion and Evaluation

Abstract

Microwave radiometer image contains information of ground brightness temperature.For its low resolution and unclear object's shape, it is not convenient to be studied. Something like SAR, synthetic aperture microwave radiometer also has the characteristics that it can acquire images during day and night and with all weather conditions. Moreover, it has the ability to penetrate surface soil or vegetation under lower frequency region. Contrast to the radiometer image, the optical images have higher resolution and contain different information. To integrate some features of these two kinds of images, some transform schemes, such as intensity|hue|saturation (IHS), principal component analysis (PCA) and wavelet transform (WT), were applied to merge the airborne synthetic aperture microwave radiometer and ETM+ images. The experiments show that the wavelet based transform method not only can preserve the spectral information of ETM+ image well, but also can preserve the texture information from radiometer image. In conclusion, the WT approach has the best potential among those three methods.