The significant issues in remote sensing image fusion are enhancing the spatial details and preserving the essential spectral information. The classical pan-sharpening methods often incur spectral distortion and still striving to produce the fused images with prominent spatial and spectral attributes. Motivated by the desirable results of sparse representation (SR) theory, a novel pan-sharpening method is developed based on SR of high frequency (HF) components over a multi-scale learned dictionary (MSLD). MSLD technique acquires the capability of extracting the intrinsic characteristics of images, wherein, it possess the features of both multi-scale representation and learned dictionaries. In this paper, the dictionaries are adaptively learned from HF sub-images derived from the two versions of panchromatic image, realized at different spatial resolutions. A fast and computationally efficient algorithm is used for dictionary learning. The notion of SR together with patch recurrence over different scales is incorporated to estimate the high frequency details. The fused image is reconstructed by injecting the band specific spatial details into the up-sampled multi-spectral images. The performance of the proposed method is appraised with the datasets from different satellite sensors namely, QuickBird, IKONOS, WorldView-2 and Pléiades. The observations inferred from visual perception and quality indices analysis manifest the efficiency of proposed method over several well-known methods for the datasets considered at reduced-scale and full-scale resolutions. Further, the quantitative analysis of obtained performance measures confirms the efficacy of the proposed method for the reduced-scale and full-scale data sets. Especially, at a reduced-scale, proposed method yields an optimal value of Correlation coefficient, Structural similarity and Q4. In a comparative sense, usage of the proposed method at full-scale results in 4% and 2.56% improvement in the Spatial distortion index for QuickBird and WorldView-2 data respectively contrary to the best reported outcome obtained from Sparse Representation of injected details (SR-D) scheme. Invariably, for full-scale data, the QNR attains its optimal value.

There exist a number of satellites on different earth observation platforms, which provide multispectral images together with a panchromatic image, that is, an image containing reflectance data representative of a wide range of bands and wavelengths. Pansharpening is a pixel-level fusion technique used to increase the spatial resolution of the multispectral image while simultaneously preserving its spectral information. In this paper, we provide a review of the pan-sharpening methods proposed in the literature giving a clear classification of them and a description of their main characteristics. Finally, we analyze how the quality of the pansharpened images can be assessed both visually and quantitatively and examine the different quality measures proposed for that purpose.

Remote sensing image fusion is an effective way to use a large volume of data from multisensor images. Most earth satellites such as SPOT, Landsat 7, IKONOS and QuickBird provide both panchromatic (Pan) images at a higher spatial resolution and multispectral (MS) images at a lower spatial resolution and many remote sensing applications require both high spatial and high spectral resolutions, especially for GIS based applications. An effective image fusion technique can produce such remotely sensed images. Image fusion is the combination of two or more different images to form a new image by using a certain algorithm to obtain more and better information about an object or a study area than. The image fusion is performed at three different processing levels which are pixel level, feature level and decision level according to the stage at which the fusion takes place. There are many image fusion methods that can be used to produce high resolution multispectral images from a high resol...

Multi sensor image fusion is the technique used to combine heterogeneous images of the same scene obtained using different sensors. The objective of image fusion is to produce a single image containing the best aspects of the fused images. Some desirable aspects of Image Fusion include high spatial resolution and high spectral resolution (multispectral and panchromatic satellite images), areas in focus (microscopy images), functional and anatomic information (medical images), different spectral information (optical and infrared images), or color information and texture information (multispectral and synthetic aperture radar images). Image fusion can also be used for providing some protection against illegal copying by embedding watermarks. For all of the schemes, it is assumed that the images have been co-registered and resampled. The aim of this survey is to present a review of publications related to Multi Sensor Image Fusion. This paper paints a comprehensive picture of Multi Sensor Image Fusion methods and their applications. This paper is an introduction for those new to the field, an overview for those working in the field and a reference for those searching for literature on a specific application. Methods are classified according to the different aspects of Multi Sensor Image Fusion.