Fusion of Multispectral And Full Polarimetric SAR Images In NSST Domain

Polarimetric SAR (POLSAR) and multispectral images provide different characteristics of the imaged objects. Multispectral provides information about surface material while POLSAR provides information about geometrical and physical properties of the objects. Merging both should resolve many of object recognition problems that exist when they are used separately. Through this paper, we propose a new scheme for image fusion of full polarization radar image (POLSAR) with multispectral optical satellite image (Egyptsat). The proposed scheme is based on Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) and multi-channel Pulse Coupled Neural Network (m-PCNN). We use NSST to decompose images into low frequency and band-pass subband coefficients. With respect to low frequency coefficients, a fusion rule is proposed based on local energy and dispersion index. In respect of sub-band coefficients, m-PCNN is used to guide how the fused sub-band coefficients are calculated using image textural information. The proposed method is applied on three batches of Egyptsat (Red-Green-infra-red) and radarsat2 (C-band full-polarimetric HH-HV and VV-polarization) images. The batches are selected to react differently with different polarization. Visual assessment of the obtained fused image gives excellent information on clarity and delineation of different objects. Quantitative evaluations show the proposed method can superior the other data fusion methods.