A survey of classical methods and new trends in pansharpening of multispectral images

Abstract

There exist a number of satellites on different earth observation platforms, which provide multispectral images together with a panchromatic image, that is, an image containing reflectance data representative of a wide range of bands and wavelengths. Pansharpening is a pixel-level fusion technique used to increase the spatial resolution of the multispectral image while simultaneously preserving its spectral information. In this paper, we provide a review of the pan-sharpening methods proposed in the literature giving a clear classification of them and a description of their main characteristics. Finally, we analyze how the quality of the pansharpened images can be assessed both visually and quantitatively and examine the different quality measures proposed for that purpose.