FUSION OF MULTISPECTRAL AND PANCHROMATIC IMAGES BASED ON THE NONSUBSAMPLED CONTOURLET TRANSFORM

This paper proposes two different methods for fusing multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) satellite images using the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The NSCT decomposes the images into several directional subbands at flexible resolutions. The finer subbands of the MS image decomposition, which represent the high frequency details, are modified with the subbands from PAN image. The inverse transform gives a high resolution MS representation of the given low resolution MS image. The paper also proposes the use of the parameters mean structural similarity index measure (MSSIM) and edge stability mean square error (ESMSE) to measure the quality of the fused image, in addition to standard parameters like correlation coefficient, PSNR, RASE and ERGAS. Experiments show that the proposed methods outperform standard fusion techniques in terms of both visual quality and quantitative error measures. The fused images obtained using the proposed methods show good structural similarity and better edge stability as the contourlet transform very well extracts the oriented edge details from the high resolution PAN image.