Image Fusion Processing for IKONOS 1-m Color Imagery

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 45; no. 10; pp. 3075 - 3086
• Main Authors: Kalpoma, K.A., Kudoh, J.-i.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2007; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Associate members; Band spectra; Blocking; Color; Discrete wavelet transforms; Distortion; Fusion power generation; Histogram matching; IKONOS; Image fusion; image fusion process; Pixel; Pixels; Principal component analysis; Remote monitoring; Spatial resolution; Spectra; spectral distortion; spectral response; steepest descent method; Studies; wavelet transform; Wavelet transforms
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2007.897692
• ISSN: 0196-2892

Many image fusion techniques have been developed. However, most existing fusion processes produce color distortion in 1-m fused IKONOS images due to nonsymmetrical spectral responses of IKONOS imagery. Here, we proposed a fusion process to minimize this spectral distortion in IKONOS 1-m color images. The 1-m fused image is produced from a 4-m multispectral (MS) and 1-m panchromatic (PAN) image, maintaining the relations of spectral responses between PAN and each band of the MS images. To obtain this relation, four spectral weighting parameters are added with the pixel value of each band of the original MS image. Then, each pixel value is updated using a steepest descent method to reflect the maximum spectral response on the fused image. Comparison among the proposed technique and existing processes [intensity hue saturation (IHS) image fusion, Brovey transform, principal component analysis, fast IHS image fusion] has been done. Our proposed technique has succeeded to generate 1-m fused images where spectral distortion has been reduced significantly, although some block distortions appeared at the edge of the fused images. To remove this block distortion, we also proposed a sharpening process using a wavelet transform, which removed block distortion without significant change in the color of the entire image.