An effective pansharpening method based on guided filtering

Pansharpening is an important tool in remote sensing applications. It transforms a set of low-spatial-resolution multispectral images to high-spatial-resolution images by fusing with a co-registered high-spatial-resolution panchromatic image. To deal with the increasing high resolution satellite images, wide varieties of pansharpening techniques have been developed. In this paper, we present an effective pansharpening method based on guided filtering. The method takes advantage of the guided filter to refine the blocking edges in the upscaled multispectral images and extract sufficient high frequency details from the panchromatic image. Moreover, it can be implemented to sharpen multispectral imagery in a convenient band-by-band manner. The experimental evaluations are carried out on QuickBird satellite images. Subjective and objective evaluations show that our proposed method can achieve high spectral and spatial quality and outperforms some existing methods.