A comparative analysis of pansharpening techniques on QuickBird and WorldView-3 images

Abstract

Nowadays, different image pansharpening methods are available, which combine the strengths of different satellite images that have different spectral and spatial resolutions. These different image fusion methods, however, add spectral and spatial distortions to the resultant images depending on the required context. Therefore, a careful selection of the fusion method is required. Simultaneously, it is also essential that the fusion technique should be efficient to cope with the large data. In this paper, we investigated how different pansharpening algorithms perform, when applied to very high-resolution WorldView-3 and QuickBird satellite images effectively and efficiently. We compared these 27 pansharpening techniques in terms of quantitative analysis, visual inspection and computational complexity, which has not previously been formally tested. In addition, 12 different image quality metrics available in literature are used for quantitative analysis purpose.

Keywords:

• Fusion
• pansharpening
• WorldView-3
• remote sensing

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thanks to DigitalGlobe Inc. and Apollo Mapping Inc. for providing the QuickBird imagery and WorldView-3 imagery respectively for scientific work.