Abstract
At present, image fusion is a wide research field, with applications from medical images to satellite images through multitemporal series of a same place. It has special interest in cartography since in photogrammetry and photointerpretation tasks, the fusion facilitates the interpretation of features which are on the ground. The images used in the present study are a panchromatic orthophoto with a spatial resolution of 0.5 m and its homologous multispectral (red, green and blue) image with a spatial resolution of 1 m. We aim to evaluate five fusion methods belonging to three different approaches. The main interest of this study is to find the best fusion method taking into account three limitations: (1) it is not possible to achieve a good registration of the images; (2) the photos were taken by two different cameras; (3) the images were taken at different times (in the years 2001 and 2004). Finally, a multidirectional approach is recommended, which is based on the visual evaluation and on the values of quality measures that are calculated.