An image fusion method based on object-oriented classification

Abstract

In image fusion of different spatial resolution multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) images, a spectrally mixed MS pixel superimposes multiple mixed PAN pixels and multiple pure PAN pixels. This verifies that with increased spatial resolution in imaging, a low spatial resolution spectrally mixed subpixel may be unmixed to be a pure pixel. However, spectral unmixing of mixed MS subpixels is rarely considered in current remote-sensing image fusion methods, resulting in blurred fused images. In the image fusion method proposed in this article, such spectral unmixing is realized. In this method, the MS and PAN images are jointly segmented into image objects, image objects are classified to obtain a classification map of the PAN image and each MS subpixel is fused to be a pixel matching the class of the corresponding PAN pixel. Tested on spatially degraded IKONOS MS and PAN images with a significant spatial resolution ratio of 8:1, the fusion method offered fused images with high spectral quality and deblurred visualization.

Acknowledgements

This research was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 40525009, 40638041), the Ministry of Education of China (Nos 104244 and IRT0755) and the Chinese ‘863’ project (2006AA06Z115 and 2008AA121103). We sincerely thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.