Visualization of Hyperspectral Images Using Bilateral Filtering

This paper presents a new approach for hyperspectral image visualization. A bilateral filtering-based approach is presented for hyperspectral image fusion to generate an appropriate resultant image. The proposed approach retains even the minor details that exist in individual image bands, by exploiting the edge-preserving characteristics of a bilateral filter. It does not introduce visible artifacts in the fused image. A hierarchical fusion scheme has also been proposed for implementation purposes to accommodate a large number of hyperspectral image bands. The proposed scheme provides computational and storage efficiency without affecting the quality and performance of the fusion. It also facilitates the midband visualization of a subset of the hyperspectral image cube. Quantitative performance results are presented to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.