Comparative analysis of different fusion rules for SAR and multi-spectral image fusion based on NSCT and IHS transform

In order to improve the fusion quality of SAR and multi-spectral image, this paper proposes an image fusion method based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and IHS transform. Since the fusion rule plays a very important role during the fusion process, four fusion rules are analyzed and compared. Three fusion rules are commonly used in previous works and a new fusion rule is proposed in this paper. To evaluate the performance of different fusion rules, fusion experiments are carried on COSMO-SkyMed SAR and Landsat OLI image. The experimental results indicate that the proposed rule is more effective than the other three regular fusion rules.