Evaluation of various pansharpening methods using image quality metrics

The pansharpening has been a wide area of interest during these days because of its applications in remote sensing, geoscience. Day by day it is going deep, vast and interesting as well. The concept arises due to the fact that data provided by most earth observation satellites such as Ikonos, geoeye, quickbird and wordview2 are composed of several channels of multispectral image and single channel of panchromatic image. The pansharpening is derived from the fusion of these two images, which actually combines the characteristics of these two images. The image quality metrics provide the information about the special and spectral quality of the image. These special and spectral qualities are provided by the panchromatic and multispectral image. Most of the existing pan-sharpening quality assessment methods consider only the spectral quality and there are just few inventions which concentrate on these spatial characteristics. This paper presents a novel approach for spatial quality evaluation of pan-sharpening in high resolution satellite imagery. Obtained results clearly show the wide spatial discrepancy in quality of Pan-sharpened images, resulting from various pan-sharpening fusion methods which confirm the need for spatial quality valuation of fused products.