A new method for multi sensor image fusion of remotely sensed images

Image fusion refers to the process of combining two or more images into one composite image, which integrates the information contained within the individual images. In this paper, we have proposed a new image fusion scheme for remotely sensed images to fuse multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (Pan) images. The existing standard Intensity Hue Saturation (IHS) method as well as "a trous" wavelet decomposition (ATWD) method are effectively integrated to incorporate the benefits of both methods efficiently. ATWD consists of adding the wavelet coefficients of the high-resolution image to the multispectral (low resolution) data, but wavelets have much less spatial information than those fused by standard Intensity-Hue-Saturation (IHS) method. Standard IHS method has high spectral distortion. In our proposed method, a modified IHS fusion new method based on controlling factor is formulated which can preserve more spatial and spectral characteristics. The performance of the proposed method is validated with SPOT SAR and LANDSAT images, where the performance analysis is yielded using correlation coefficient and root mean square error (RMSE). The effectiveness and the performance of the proposed method is found to be superior than the existing ones. The proposed new method gives the best results among all by preserving both spectral and spatial information.