A New Adaptive Component-Substitution-Based Satellite Image Fusion by Using Partial Replacement

Preservation of spectral information and enhancement of spatial resolution are regarded as important issues in remote sensing satellite image fusion. In previous research, various algorithms have been proposed. Although they have been successful, there are still some margins of spatial and spectral quality that can be improved. In addition, a new method that can be used for various types of sensors is required. In this paper, a new adaptive fusion method based on component substitution is proposed to merge a high-spatial-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with a multispectral image. This method generates high-/low-resolution synthetic component images by partial replacement and uses statistical ratio-based high-frequency injection. Various remote sensing satellite images, such as IKONOS-2, QuickBird, LANDSAT ETM+, and SPOT-5, were employed in the evaluation. Experiments showed that this approach can resolve spectral distortion problems and successfully conserve the spatial information of a PAN image. Thus, the fused image obtained from the proposed method gave higher fusion quality than the images from some other methods. In addition, the proposed method worked efficiently with the different sensors considered in the evaluation.