Comparison of Fusion Techniques for Very High Resolution Data for Extraction of Urban Land-Cover

This paper aims in presenting a thorough comparison of performance of pan sharpening techniques, belonging to spatial, spectral, scale-space and spatial-frequency domain, for Very High Resolution Satellite Data. With the availability of new Very High Resolution sensors, especially, World View-2 sensor, which provides data at sub-meter level, the need for fusion of Panchromatic (PAN) and Multispectral (MS) images has to be further investigated. Pan-sharpening techniques namely, Hue-Saturation-Intensity, Brovey Transform, Principal Components Analysis, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Stationary Wavelet Transform, Non Sub-sampled contourlet Transform and Pseudo Wigner Distribution (PWD) fusion method have been selected for the fusion of PAN and MS images of World View-2 sensor. Further, the comparison of performance of each of the techniques have been carried out by using various evaluation indicators, such as, Root Mean Square Error, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Correlation Coefficient, Universal Image Quality Index. It is found that PWD based fusion technique gives good result with a good trade-off between the preservation of spectral information and enhancement of spatial resolution.