Generalized IHS-Based Satellite Imagery Fusion Using Spectral Response Functions

Image fusion is a technical method to integrate the spatial details of the high-resolution panchromatic (HRP) image and the spectral information of low-resolution multispectral (LRM) images to produce high-resolution multispectral images. The most important point in image fusion is enhancing the spatial details of the HRP image and simultaneously maintaining the spectral information of the LRM images. This implies that the physical characteristics of a satellite sensor should be considered in the fusion process. Also, to fuse massive satellite images, the fusion method should have low computation costs. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient satellite image fusion method. The proposed method uses the spectral response functions of a satellite sensor; thus, it rationally reflects the physical characteristics of the satellite sensor to the fused image. As a result, the proposed method provides high-quality fused images in terms of spectral and spatial evaluations. The experimental results of IKONOS images indicate that the proposed method outperforms the intensity-hue-saturation and wavelet-based methods.