Three-branch neural network for No-Reference Quality assessment of Pan-Sharpened Images

Pan-Sharpening (PS) techniques aim to enhance the spatial resolution of low-resolution multispectral images by leveraging data from high-resolution panchromatic images. Their comparison typically relies on the quality assessment of the resulting Full-Resolution (FS) pan-sharpened images. However, in the absence of a reference image, a dedicated No-Reference (NR) method must be employed. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel approach called the Three-Branch Neural Network for No-Reference Quality Assessment of Pan-Sharpened Images (TBN-PSI). The network consists of three subnetworks designed for perceptual processing of image channels, featuring shared extraction of low-level features and high-level semantics. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the approach over the state-of-the-art NR PS image quality assessment methods, using six datasets containing diverse satellite images that span urban areas, green vegetation, and water scenarios. Specifically, TBN-PSI outperforms the compared methods by 4% to 9% in terms of Spearman’s Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SRCC), Pearson’s Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC), and Kendall’s Rank Correlation Coefficient (KRCC) between the obtained scores and those of three representative full-reference methods.