A Comparative Analysis of Image Fusion Techniques for Remote Sensed Images

This paper deals with different techniques for registration and fusion of remote sensed images. In this work the lower spatial resolution multispectral and higher resolution panchromatic images of SPOT satellite are used. These images are registered using a registration algorithm that combines a simple yet powerful search strategy based on stochastic gradient with the similarity measure as mutual information, together with a wavelet-based multi-resolution pyramid. The algorithm is found to give sub pixel registration accuracy. The study is limited to pairs of images, which are misaligned by rotation and/or translation. The registered images are subjected to a pixel level multispectral image fusion process using wavelet transform approach. Spectral quality assessments shows that compared to other conventional image fusion techniques, this fusion process using wavelet transform keeps much of the spectral information in the merged image with respect to the original multispectral one. Finally, segmentation is performed on the fused images to validate the algorithms used for registration and fusion and the results show better accuracy for wavelet based methods than the conventional methods.