Variational Wavelet Pan-Sharpening

Pan-sharpening is the process of fusing a low resolution multispectral image with a high resolution panchromatic image to obtain a high resolution multispectral image. We propose a new pan-sharpening method called Variational Wavelet Pan-sharpening (VWP) that combines wavelet fusion and the edges of the panchromatic image as an energy minimization problem. Furthermore, we introduce additional energy terms to explicitly preserve the color information within each band and the correlation between bands. Numerical results are presented on Quickbird data and compared to various pan-sharpening methods with the help of image quality metrics. VWP is shown to outperform existing methods in the sense that it produces high quality images, whereas the choice of parameter determines the amount of spatial and spectral quality.