Pan-sharpening based on Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform detail extraction

In this paper, we propose a new pan-sharpening method using Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform. The panchromatic (Pan) and multi-spectral (MS) images provided by many satellites have high spatial and high spectral resolutions, respectively. The pan-sharpened image which has high spatial and spectral resolutions is obtained by using these images. Since the NSCT is shift invariant and it has better directional decomposition capability compared to contourlet transform, we use it to extract high frequency information from the available Pan image. First, two level NSCT decomposition is performed on the Pan image which has high spatial resolution. The required high frequency details are obtained by using the coarser subband available after the two level NSCT decomposition of the Pan image. The coarser sub-band is subtracted from the original Pan image to obtain these details. These extracted details are then added to MS image such that the original spectral signature is preserved in the final fused image. The experiments have been conducted on images captured from different satellite sensors such as IKonos-2, Worlview-2 and Quickbird. The traditional quantitative measures along with quality with no reference (QNR) index are evaluated to check the potential of the proposed method. The proposed approach performs better compared to the recently proposed state of the art methods such as additive wavelet luminance proportional (AWLP) method and context based decision (CBD) method.