Remote sensing image fusion using multiscale mapped LS-SVM

The panchromatic (Pan) sharpening of multispectral (MS) bands is an important technique in the various applications of satellite remote sensing. This paper presents an MS Pan-sharpening method using the proposed multiscale mapped least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). Under the LS-SVM framework, the salient features underlying the image are represented by support values, and the support value transform (SVT) is developed for image information extraction. The low-resolution MS bands are resampled to the fine scale of the Pan image and sharpened by injecting the detailed features extracted from the high-resolution Pan image. The support value analysis is implemented by using a series of multiscale support value filters that are deduced from the mapped LS-SVM with multiscale Gaussian radial basis function kernels. Experiments are carried out on very high resolution QuickBird MS + Pan data. Fusion simulations on spatially degraded data, whose original MS bands are available for reference, show that the proposed MS Pan-sharpening method performs comparable to the state-of-the-art in terms of the pertained quantitative quality evaluation indexes, such as the Spectral Angle Mapper, relative dimensionless global error in synthesis (ERGAS), modulation-transfer-function-based tool and quality index (Q4), etc. The SVT is an effective tool for remote sensing image fusion.