Intensity Transformation Fusion of Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared (TIR) Imagery

Abstract

The spatial resolution of panchromatic (PAN) and thermal infrared (TIR) band is 15 m and 100 m respectively in Landsat-8 satellite dataset. The current research proposes an Intensity transformation based fusion method (ITFM) of PAN and TIR imagery. The proposed fusion method introduces unscented spatial filtering of input TIR and PAN images and component based fusion to downscale coarse resolution thermal data. The proposed algorithm has been examined with three thermal image downscaling methods, i.e., DisTrad, TsHARP and Local model. The relative comparison of fusion algorithms results has shown that the proposed ITFM fusion method has outperformed the other conventional methods. The proposed ITFM fusion method has merged edge details from PAN band and earth surface thermal information from TIR band precisely.