Fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images by local mean and variance matching filtering techniques

Since the advent of high spatial resolution satellite images, the merging of multiresolution images has been an important field of research. Many methods have been developed in the last few years producing good quality merged images characterised by a high spatial information content, but with significantly altered spectral information content. The merging method applied in this case study tends to preserve this spectral information by producing new channels highly correlated with the original ones. The method analyses local image statistics and then matches the local histograms of the two images to be merged by applying mean or mean-variance matching normalisation functions. In this article two different sets of panchromatic and multispectral images with resolution ratios of 4 and 5 are fused and the quality of the result in regard of spectral information preservation is assessed.