Multi-sensor image fusion using multirate filter banks

This paper presents a multi-resolution data fusion scheme, based on multirate image representation. Motivated by analytical results obtained from high-resolution multispectral image data analysis: the energy packing the spectral features are distributed in the lower frequency bands, and the spatial features, edges, are distributed in the higher frequency bands. This allows to spatially enhance the multispectral images, by adding the high-resolution spatial features (extracted from the higher subbands of a panchromatic image) to them, by a multirate filtering procedure. This technique finds application in multi-spectral image interpretation, as well as medical images of the same part of body obtained by several different imaging modalities, e.g. CT images with MRI images. The proposed method is compared with some conventional methods. Results show it preserves more spectral features with less spatial distortion