Image Fusion Techniques in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing image fusion is an effective way to use a large volume of data from multisensor images. Most earth satellites such as SPOT, Landsat 7, IKONOS and QuickBird provide both panchromatic (Pan) images at a higher spatial resolution and multispectral (MS) images at a lower spatial resolution and many remote sensing applications require both high spatial and high spectral resolutions, especially for GIS based applications. An effective image fusion technique can produce such remotely sensed images. Image fusion is the combination of two or more different images to form a new image by using a certain algorithm to obtain more and better information about an object or a study area than. The image fusion is performed at three different processing levels which are pixel level, feature level and decision level according to the stage at which the fusion takes place. There are many image fusion methods that can be used to produce high resolution multispectral images from a high resolution pan image and low resolution multispectral images. This paper explores the major remote sensing data fusion techniques at pixel level and reviews the concept, principals, limitations and advantages for each technique. This paper focused on traditional techniques like intensity hue-saturation- (HIS), Brovey, principal component analysis (PCA) and Wavelet.