A pansharpened image quality assessment using segmentation procedure

ABSTRACT

Pansharpening is an important way of integrating spatial and spectral information in the field of remote sensing. This field uses the complementary and redundant information between multispectral (MS) images and panchromatic (PAN) images to obtain high spectral and high spatial resolution images. Various pansharpening methods have been introduced so far, each one attempting to provide a pansharpened image with the least distortion and maximum preservation of spectral and spatial information. Due to the importance of this issue, there should be methods and indices to evaluate the performance of different pansharpening algorithms and assess the quality of pansharpened images. In this paper, a segmentation-based method for assessing the quality of fused images is proposed. The advantage of this approach over pixel-based methods is that the pixel-based methods consider the fused images as a set of separate pixels while segmentation can take into account useful spatial information such as neighbourhoods, textures, etc. In the proposed method, by using k-means clustering algorithm, the reference and pansharpened images are segmented into areas with similar spectral and spatial features and the corresponding segments of the images are compared. This method is tested on three real data sets acquired by Pleiades, GeoEye-1, and QuickBird sensors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in evaluation of the quality of fused images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.