Quadratic Programming Approach to Pansharpening of Multispectral Images Using a Regression Model

This study presents an approach to synthesize multispectral images at a higher resolution by exploiting a high-resolution image acquired in panchromatic modality. The synthesized images should be similar to the multispectral images that would have been observed by the corresponding sensor at the same high resolution. The proposed scheme is designed to reconstruct the multispectral images at the higher resolution with as less color distortion as possible. It uses a regression model of the second order to fit panchromatic data to multispectral observations. Based on the regression model, the multispectral images at the higher spatial resolution of the panchromatic image are optimized by a quadratic programming. In this study, the new method was applied to the IKONOS 1m panchromatic and 4m multispectral data, and the results were compared with them of several current approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve significant improvement over other methods.