An efficient PAN sharpening technique by merging two hybrid approaches

To improve the spatial quality in multispectral satellite images by injecting high spatial details from the panchromatic image using two hybrid techniques namely local variation+contourlet transform(local variation+CT) and Adaptive Principal Component Analysis +Contourlet transform(APCA+CT). This process of injecting information from the high spatial resolution panchromatic image into the low spatial resolution multispectral image to get a high spatial and spectral quality satellite image is known as Pan-Sharpening. The final pan-sharpened image is required to retain the natural color of the multi-spectral input image with minimum spectral distortion and enhanced spatial details of the panchromatic image. The proposed technique by merging two hybrid approaches performs better than the existing techniques. The performance of this proposed fusion technique is highlighted by comparing with conventional techniques like PCA, PCA+CT, APCA, APCA+CT in terms of ERGAS and universal image quality index, Q. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of ICCTSD 2011