Simultaneous Fusion and Denoising of Panchromatic and Multispectral Satellite Images

Abstract

To identify objects in satellite images, multispectral (MS) images with high spectral resolution and low spatial resolution, and panchromatic (Pan) images with high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution need to be fused. Several fusion methods such as the intensity–hue–saturation (IHS), the discrete wavelet transform, the discrete wavelet frame transform (DWFT), and the principal component analysis have been proposed in recent years to obtain images with both high spectral and spatial resolutions. In this paper, a hybrid fusion method for satellite images comprising both the IHS transform and the DWFT is proposed. This method tries to achieve the highest possible spectral and spatial resolutions with as small distortion in the fused image as possible. A comparison study between the proposed hybrid method and the traditional methods is presented in this paper. Different MS and Pan images from Landsat-5, Spot, Landsat-7, and IKONOS satellites are used in this comparison. The effect of noise on the proposed hybrid fusion method as well as the traditional fusion methods is studied. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed hybrid method to the traditional methods. The results show also that a wavelet denoising step is required when fusion is performed at low signal-to-noise ratios.