Joint multichannel pansharpening for multispectral imagery

Pan-sharpening is a common post-processing operation for captured multispectral satellite imagery, where the spatial resolution of images gathered in various spectral bands is enhanced by fusing them with a panchromatic image captured at a higher resolution. Previously proposed pan-sharpening techniques operate on a per-channel basis, sharpening each multispectral band independently based on the panchromatic image, often in an ad hoc manner. In contrast with most prior techniques, we formulate pan-sharpening as the problem of jointly estimating the high resolution multispectral images to minimize the combined squared residual error in physically motivated observation models of the low resolution multispectral and the high resolution panchromatic images. To realize pan-sharpening using our proposed formulation, we develop an iterative algorithm to solve the joint minimization resulting in an overall algorithm with modest computational complexity. We evaluate our proposed algorithm and benchmark it against previously proposed methods using established quantitative measures of SNR, SAM, ERGAS, Q, and Q4 indices. Both the quantitative results and visual evaluation demonstrate that the proposed joint formulation provides superior results compared with pre-existing methods.