A spatiotemporal transferable image fusion technique for GeoEye-1 satellite imagery

This study proposed a novel technique to solve the problem of color distortion in the fusion of the GeoEye-1 satellite's panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images. This technique suggested reducing the difference in radiometry between the PAN and MS images by using modification coefficients for the MS bands in the definition of the intensity (I) equation, which guarantees using only the overlapped wavelengths with the PAN band. These modification coefficients achieve spatiotemporal transferability for the proposed fusion technique. As the reflectance of vegetation is high in the NIR band and low in the RGB bands, this technique suggested using an additional coefficient for the NIR band in the definition of the I equation, which varies based on the ratio of the agricultural features within the image, to indicate the correct impact of vegetation. This vegetation coefficient provides stability for the proposed fusion technique across all land cover classes. This study used three datasets of GeoEye-1 satellite PAN and MS images in Tanta City, Egypt, with different land cover classes (agricultural, urban, and mixed areas), to evaluate the performance of this technique against five different standard image fusion techniques. In addition, it was validated using six additional datasets from different locations and acquired at different times to test its spatiotemporal transferability. The proposed fusion technique demonstrated spatiotemporal transferability as well as great efficiency in producing fused images of superior spatial and spectral quality for all types of land cover.