A Comprehensive Evaluation of PAN-Sharpening Algorithms Coupled with Resampling Methods for Image Synthesis of Very High Resolution Remotely Sensed Satellite Data

Abstract

The merging of a panchromatic (PAN) image with a multispectral satellite image (MSI) to increase the spatial resolution of the MSI, while simultaneously preserving its spectral information is classically referred as PAN-sharpening. We employed a recent dataset derived from very high resolution of WorldView-2 satellite (PAN and MSI) for two test sites (one over an urban area and the other over Antarctica), to comprehensively evaluate the performance of six existing PAN-sharpening algorithms. The algorithms under consideration were the Gram-Schmidt (GS), Ehlers fusion (EF), modified hue-intensity-saturation (Mod-HIS), high pass filtering (HPF), the Brovey transform (BT), and wavelet-based principal component analysis (W-PC). Quality assessment of the sharpened images was carried out by using 20 quality indices. We also analyzed the performance of nearest neighbour (NN), bilinear interpolation (BI), and cubic convolution (CC) resampling methods to test their practicability in the PAN-sharpening process. Our results indicate that the comprehensive performance of PAN-sharpening methods decreased in the following order: GS > W-PC > EF > HPF > Mod-HIS > BT, while resampling methods followed the order: NN > BI > CC.