Pansharpening of remote sensing images with a matting model

A novel matting model based pansharpening (MMP) method is proposed for creating a fused image of high spatial and spectral resolutions through merging a panchromatic (PAN) image with a multi-spectral (MS) image. Matting model refers to that an MS image can be decomposed into three components, i.e., alpha channel, spectral foreground and background. Through substituting the alpha channel of the MS image with the PAN image, the edge information from the PAN image can be transferred into the MS image without causing spectral distortion. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method by subjective and objective evaluation.