Satellite image pansharpening by chrominance propagation combined with kernel interpolation

This paper describes a method for propagation-based spacial interpolation of missing color information on satellite images. Most of the land-observation satellites produce two types of imagery for every scene multispectral and panchromatic. The first kind is characterized by lower spatial resolution but higher spectral one, while the second is a graylevel image at higher resolution. In order to get full color visualization of a scene the high-resolution panchromatic image must be combined with lowresolution color information taken from the multispectral bands. This process is called pansharpening. In this paper the new method for pansharpening is proposed. It combines chrominance propagation with kernel interpolation. Thanks to the propagation step, the method properly reconstructs color information and does not blur the edges on color channels.