Image fusion algorithm for multispectral and panchromatic data based on multiple criteria

Image fusion is a very important research field in remote sensing. In this paper, we propose a fusion algorithm that combines PCA and discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The first principal component of multispectral images and panchromatic image is decomposed by DWT, the focus in the fusion procedure is choosing a set of basic operations on particular sets of wavelet coefficients which correspond to certain frequency bands. Since previous researches had considered relatively simple fusion rules for combining the wavelet coefficients, we developed a multiple criteria based image fusion algorithm which combines several fusion rules including pixel-level rules and feature-level rules to make the final fusion decision under the general framework for multiresolution image fusion. The experiment result of fusion IKONOS panchromatic and multispectral images shows that the proposed method can improve spatial resolution of multispectral images and is suitable for human vision system observation.