Spatial Quality Assessment of Pansharpened Images Based on Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix

Abstract

Assessing the quality of pansharpened images is a critical issue in order to obtain a quantitative score to represent the quality and compare the performance of different fusion methods. Most of the introduced metrics for pansharpened image quality assessment, evaluate the spectral content of the image, while in different applications of remote sensing like detection and identification of image objects, spatial quality has an important role. In the current study, a new index for spatial quality assessment is introduced that extracts gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) from distorted and reference images and compares the similarities of these features. The tempere image database 2013 (TID2013) that provides reference and different types of distorted images with subjective scores of each image is used as the desired database. To solve the high computational complexity of obtaining GLCM features, the fast GLCM method is employed. In this way, 16 different features are extracted. To select the features that have the most consistency with the human visual system (HVS), the forward floating search method is used as a feature selection method and five features are obtained as the final features to form the desired index. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method in determining the spatial quality of fused images compared with that of the available quality assessment metrics.