An edge preserving multi-resolution image fusion: Use of joint bilateral filter

In this paper, we propose a new fusion method based on an edge preserving joint bilateral filter. Here, a multistage form of joint bilateral filter is used to fuse high spectral resolution multispectral (MS) and high spatial resolution panchromatic (PAN) images. In the detail extraction process, both PAN and MS images are used to obtain the available high frequency details. First, the details of PAN image are extracted by using MS image as an auxiliary input to the joint bilateral filter. Similarly, PAN image is used as an auxiliary image to joint bilateral filter to extract the high frequency features from the MS image. This process is extended to multistage form in order to obtain the meaningful details from PAN as well as MS images. Next, these extracted details are first weighted with an average gain and then fused separately with the four MS image bands i.e. red (R), green (G), blue (B) and near infra-red (NIR) to obtain four consistent image bands. The proposed method is tested over images obtained from Quick-bird satellite. The experimental results are compared with the widely popular methods as well as recently proposed methods.