291
Views
25
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

A technique based on non-linear transform and multivariate analysis to merge thermal infrared data and higher-resolution multispectral data

&
Pages 6459-6471 | Received 03 Jan 2006, Accepted 21 Jan 2009, Published online: 14 Dec 2010
 

Abstract

A thermal infrared (TIR) image is a measure of the Earth's surface temperature and TIR emittance; however, its low spatial resolution severely limits its potential applications. Image fusion techniques can be used to fuse a TIR image with higher spatial resolution reflective bands to generate a synthetic TIR image. Because of the weak correlation between TIR and reflective data, such a synthetic image typically contains significant spectral distortion. In this paper, a multivariate analysis technique is used to derive a variable as a linear function of multiple reflective bands and their non-linearly transformed versions, to produce the maximum correlation with the TIR image. The spatial details of the variable are then injected into the TIR image to yield a synthetic image with reduced spectral distortion. In an experiment on Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) TIR and reflective data, the fusion method proposed in this paper outperforms several existing methods in preserving the spectral characteristics of TIR data.

Acknowledgements

This research was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 40525009 and 40638041), the Ministry of Education of China (No. 104244, No. IRT0755), and the Chinese ‘863’ project (2006AA06Z115). We thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.