Weighted Least Squares Pan-Sharpening of Very High Resolution Multispectral Images

This paper presents a solution to the problem of enhancing the spatial resolution of multispectral images with high-resolution panchromatic observations. The proposed method exploits a Weighted Least Squares estimator to calculate injection parameters in the fusion model. For each pixel of the image a weight is calculated by a classification map. The classifier used in the experiments is a Support Vector Machine in order to obtain high accuracy on each land-cover type. Results are presented and discussed on very-high resolution images acquired by Quickbird and Ikonos satellite systems. Fusion simulations on spatially degraded data and fusion tests at full scale reveal that an accurate and reliable PAN-sharpening is achieved by the proposed method.