A review of image fusion techniques for pan-sharpening of high-resolution satellite imagery

Abstract Pan-sharpening methods are commonly used to synthesize multispectral and panchromatic images. Selecting an appropriate algorithm that maintains the spectral and spatial information content of input images is a challenging task. This review paper investigates a wide range of algorithms, including 41 methods. For this purpose, the methods were categorized as Component Substitution (CS-based), Multi-Resolution Analysis (MRA), Variational Optimization-based (VO), and Hybrid and were tested on a collection of 21 case studies. These include images from WorldView-2, 3 & 4, GeoEye-1, QuickBird, IKONOS, KompSat-2, KompSat-3A, TripleSat, Pleiades-1, Pleiades with the aerial platform, and Deimos-2. Neural network-based methods were excluded due to their substantial computational requirements for operational mapping purposes. The methods were evaluated based on four Spectral and three Spatial quality metrics. An Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) was used to statistically compare the pan-sharpening categories. Results indicate that MRA-based methods performed better in terms of spectral quality, whereas most Hybrid-based methods had the highest spatial quality and CS-based methods had the lowest results both spectrally and spatially. The revisited version of the Additive Wavelet Luminance Proportional Pan-sharpening method had the highest spectral quality, whereas Generalized IHS with Best Trade-off Parameter with Additive Weights showed the highest spatial quality. CS-based methods generally had the fastest run-time, whereas the majority of methods belonging to MRA and VO categories had relatively long run times.