Abstract
Most of the existing pan-sharpening quality assessment methods consider only the spectral quality and there are just few investigations, which concentrate on spatial characteristics. Spatial quality of pan-sharpened images is vital in elaborating the capability of object extraction, identification, or reconstruction, especially regarding man-made objects and their application for large scale mapping in urban areas. This paper presents an Edge based image Fusion Metric (EFM) for spatial quality evaluation of pan-sharpening in high resolution satellite imagery. Considering Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) as a precise measurement of edge response, MTFs of pan-sharpened images are assessed and compared to those obtained from the original multispectral or panchromatic images. Spatial quality assessment of pan-sharpening is done by comparison of MTF curves of the pan-sharpened and reference images. The capability of the proposed method is evaluated by quality assessment of two different residential and industrial urban areas of WorldView-2 pan-sharpened images. Obtained results clearly show the wide spatial discrepancy in quality of Pan-sharpened images, resulting from different fusion methods, and confirm the need for spatial quality assessment of fused products. The results also prove the capability of the proposed EFM as a powerful tool for evaluation and comparison of different image fusion techniques and products.
Highlights
Technological limitations in producing images, with both high spectral and spatial resolutions in remote sensing, have led to the introduction of the pan-sharpening process, which produces synthesized multispectral high resolution data
Two different sections of a WorldView-2 high-resolution satellite image data set are used in this experiment, which covers the urban area of Melbourne city (Figure 3)
Additive Wavelet Principal Component (AWPC) and Weighted Wavelet Intensity (WWI) methods are selected among the wavelet-based methods and Improved Generalized IHS with Adaptive Weights (IGIHS-AW) and traditional IHS
Summary
Technological limitations in producing images, with both high spectral and spatial resolutions in remote sensing, have led to the introduction of the pan-sharpening (i.e., image fusion) process, which produces synthesized multispectral high resolution data. Subjective analysis involves visual comparison of colors between original multispectral (MS) and fused images, and the spatial details between original panchromatic (pan) and fused images These methods could not yet be fully represented by mathematical models, and their techniques are mainly visual, costly, and time-consuming procedures [6]. Considering limitations of the subjective quality assessment, efforts have been made to develop objective image fusion quality assessment methods [6,7,8]. These kinds of methods involve a set of predefined quality indicators for measuring the spectral and spatial similarities between the fused image and the original MS and/or Pan-images
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