No-Reference Quality Assessment of Pan-Sharpening Images with Multi-Level Deep Image Representations

Abstract

The Pan-Sharpening (PS) techniques provide a better visualization of a multi-band image using the high-resolution single-band image. To support their development and evaluation, in this paper, a novel, accurate, and automatic No-Reference (NR) PS Image Quality Assessment (IQA) method is proposed. In the method, responses of two complementary network architectures in a form of extracted multi-level representations of PS images are employed as quality-aware information. Specifically, high-dimensional data are separately extracted from the layers of the networks and further processed with the Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) to obtain features used to create a PS quality model. Extensive experimental comparison of the method on the large database of PS images against the state-of-the-art techniques, including popular NR methods adapted in this study to the PS IQA, indicates its superiority in terms of typical criteria.