A New Pansharpening Algorithm Based on Total Variation

• Published in: IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 318 - 322
• Main Authors: Palsson, Frosti, Sveinsson, Johannes R., Ulfarsson, Magnus O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-01-2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Distortion; Image fusion; Manganese; Measurement; pansharpening; remote sensing; Spatial resolution; total variation
• ISSN: 1545-598X; 1558-0571
• DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2013.2257669

In this letter, we present a new method for the pansharpening of multispectral satellite imagery. Pansharpening is the process of synthesizing a high spatial resolution multispectral image from a low spatial resolution multispectral image and a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. The method uses total variation to regularize an ill-posed problem dictated by a widely used explicit image formation model. This model is based on the assumptions that a linear combination of the bands of the pansharpened image gives the PAN image and that a decimation of the pansharpened image gives the original multispectral image. Experimental results are based on two real datasets and the quantitative quality of the pansharpened images is evaluated using a number of spatial and spectral metrics, some of which have been recently proposed and do not need a reference image. The proposed method compares favorably to other well-known methods for pansharpening and produces images of excellent spatial and spectral quality.