Comparison of various pan-sharpening methods using Quickbird-2 and Landsat-8 imagery

Pan-sharpening is the process of transferring the spatial resolution of panchromatic (PAN) image to a multispectral (MS) image for producing a single image with high spatial detail and rich spectral information. In this study, PAN and MS imagery of Quickbird-2 and Landsat-8 are fused separately, using ten different pan-sharpening methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), modified-intensity hue saturation (M-IHS), multiplicative, brovey transform (BT), wavelet-principal component analysis (W-PCA), hyperspectral color space (HCS), high-pass filter (HPF), Gram-Schmidt (GS), Fuze Go, and non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The effectiveness of these techniques is assessed and compared by qualitative analysis and 14 quantitative analysis methods including bias, correlation coefficient (CC), difference in variance (DIV), relative dimensionless global error in synthesis (ERGAS), universal image quality index (Q), relative average spectral error (RASE), root mean square error (RMSE), structural similarity index method (SSIM), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), peak SNR (PSNR), spatial correlation coefficient (SCC), image entropy (E), and gradient and quality with no reference image (QNR). The results of both analysis types show that the Fuze Go and NSCT produced the best fused image with high spatial detail and rich spectral information followed by the HPF and GS.