A region based remote sensing image fusion using anisotropic diffusion process

ABSTRACT The aim of remote sensing image fusion is to merge the high spectral resolution multispectral (MS) image with high spatial resolution panchromatic (PAN) image to get a high spatial resolution MS image with less spectral distortion. The conventional pixel level fusion techniques suffer from the halo effect and gradient reversal. To solve this problem, a new region-based method using anisotropic diffusion (AD) for remote sensing image fusion is investigated. The basic idea is to fuse the ‘Y’ component only (of YCbCr colour space) of the MS image with the PAN image. The base layers and detail layers of the input images obtained using the AD process are segmented using the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm and combined based on their spatial frequency. The fusion experiment uses three data sets. The contributions of this paper are as follows: i) it solves the chromaticity loss problem at the time of fusion, ii) the AD filter with the region-based fusion approach is brought into the context of remote sensing application for the first time, and iii) the edge info in the input images is retained. A qualitative and quantitative comparison is made with classic and recent state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method produces promising fusion results.