High spectral quality pansharpening approach based on MTF-matched filter banks

Abstract

Pansharpening consists in merging a low-resolution multispectral image (MS) with a high spatial resolution panchromatic image (PAN) to produce a high resolution pansharpened MS image. It consists in enhancing spatially the low-resolution MS image by injecting the missing details provided by the high-resolution PAN image. In this paper, we propose a novel pansharpening approach based on decomposition/reconstruction processing using low-pass and high-pass filter banks. On the one hand, the low-pass approximation (taking into account the imaging system modulation transfer function MTF) of the pansharpened MS image is assumed to be equal to the original MS image in order to preserve the spectral quality. On the other hand, the high-pass filter allowing us to extract the high-frequency PAN details is designed as complementary filter to the low-pass one in order to provide perfect reconstruction in the ideal case. Quantitative assessment performed on reduced and full-resolution images are used to validate the proposed technique and compare it to state-of-art. Experimental results using Pleaides and GeoEye-1 data show that our proposed fusion schema outperforms the pre-existing methods visually as well as quantitatively.