A review and comparison of commercially available pan-sharpening techniques for high resolution satellite image fusion

High resolution panchromatic (Pan) and multispectral (MS) images from modern satellites have been increasingly used in remote sensing applications. Many pan-sharpening algorithms have been adopted by commercial remote sensing and GIS software packages. However, discrepant pan-sharpening results have been reported by different papers using different fusion techniques and images. There is a lack of common understanding of the performance of the techniques. The paper provides an overview and the results of a comprehensive test and evaluation of commercial techniques for pan-sharpening IKONOS, QuickBird, GeoEye-1, and WorldView-2 images.