LAUSR

ABSTRACT Due to the different characteristics of satellite imagery, pan-sharpening has become an important field of remote sensing science. It is a reliable method to fuse the high-resolution panchromatic (Pan) image with the low-resolution multispectral (MS) images to generate a composite high-resolution MS (pan-sharpened) image. In this paper, we propose a robust pan-sharpening technique which combines the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) with kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). An enhancement method is executed on the source MS image to retain the maximum spatial information present in the MS bands based on the intensity hue saturation (IHS) colour space transform. The proposed pan-sharpening technique is performed as follows: first, the source Pan and MS images are divided into high and low-pass coefficients by NSCT. Second, KPCA is used to propose an effective fusion rule for choosing appropriate low-pass NSCT coefficients for fusion. The high-pass coefficients are fused by proposing an enhanced sum modified Laplacian method (SML). Finally, the final pan-sharpened image is obtained by performing an inverse NSCT and inverse IHS transform on the fused low and high-pass coefficients. Four different groups of satellite image datasets are utilized in the experiments, which show that the proposed technique can both preserve the spatial details of the source images well and avoid spectral distortion. In addition, different image fusion quality metrics are adopted to evaluate the spectral and spatial qualities of the pan-sharpened image. Compared to the state-of-the-art pan-sharpening methods, the proposed technique achieved better performance in balancing spectral and spatial information and improved pan-sharpening results in terms of both visual quality and objective measurements.