Selective Synthetic Aperture Radar and Panchromatic Image Fusion by Using the à Trous Wavelet Decomposition

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging sensor presents an important advantage for the earth change observation independently of weather conditions. However, the SAR image provides an incomplete information (as roads) of the observed scene leading thus to an ambiguous interpretation. In order to compensate the lack of features, the high spatial resolution panchromatic (P) image is often used as a complementary data for improving the quality of the SAR image. The concept is based on the extraction of features (details) from the P image in order to incorporate into the SAR image. Therefore, we propose an approach based on the use of the à trous wavelet decomposition (ATWD) for extracting features from the P image. Experimental results show that the SAR-P composite image allows a better detection of lines, edges, and field boundaries.