A CNN-Based Pan-Sharpening Method for Integrating Panchromatic and Multispectral Images Using Landsat 8

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 11; no. 22; p. 2606
• Main Authors: Li, Zhiqiang, Cheng, Chengqi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-11-2019
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; convolutional neural network; Dictionaries; Landsat; Landsat satellites; Learning; Linear filters; Methods; multispectral images; Neural networks; Optimization; pan-sharpening; panchromatic images; Parameter sensitivity; Principal components analysis; Qualitative analysis; Remote sensing; Root-mean-square errors; Satellite imagery; Satellites; Sensitivity analysis; Sensors; Sharpening; Sparsity; Spatial discrimination; Spatial resolution; transfer learning
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs11222606

The increasing availability of sensors enables the combination of a high-spatial-resolution panchromatic image and a low-spatial-resolution multispectral image, which has become a hotspot in recent years for many applications. To address the spectral and spatial distortions that adversely affect the conventional methods, a pan-sharpening method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed in this paper, where the low-spatial-resolution multispectral image is upgraded and integrated with the high-spatial-resolution panchromatic image to produce a new multispectral image with high spatial resolution. Based on the pyramid structure of the CNN architecture, the proposed method has high learning capacity to generate more representative and robust hierarchical features for construction tasks. Moreover, the highly nonlinear fusion process can be effectively simulated by stacking several linear filtering layers, which is suitable for learning the complex mapping relationship between a high-spatial-resolution panchromatic and low-spatial-resolution multispectral image. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental analyses were carried out on images captured from a Landsat 8 on-board operational land imager (LOI) sensor to demonstrate the method’s performance. The results regarding the sensitivity analysis of the involved parameters indicate the effects of parameters on the performance of our CNN-based pan-sharpening approach. Additionally, our CNN-based pan-sharpening approach outperforms other existing conventional pan-sharpening methods with a more promising fusion result for different landcovers, with differences in Erreur Relative Globale Adimensionnelle de Synthse (ERGAS), root-mean-squared error (RMSE), and spectral angle mapper (SAM) of 0.69, 0.0021, and 0.81 on average, respectively.