Fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images using improved GIHS and PCA mergers based on contourlet - art. no. 67871J

Since Chavez proposed the highpass filtering procedure to fuse multispectral and panchromatic images, several fusion methods have been developed based on the same principle: to extract from the panchromatic image spatial detail information to later inject it into the multispectral one. In this paper, we present new fusion alternatives based on the same concept. using the multiresolution contourlet decomposition to execute the detail extraction phase and the generalized intensity-hue-saturation (GIHS) and principal component analysis (PCA) procedures to inject the spatial detail of the panchromatic image into the multispectral one. Experimental results show the new fusion method have better performance than GIHS, PCA, wavelet and the method of improved GINS and PCA mergers based on wavelet decomposition.