Approach to maximize increased details and minimize color distortion for IKONOS and QuickBird image fusion

Both IKONOS and QuickBird offer 11-bit panchromatic and multispectral data in which more details can be extracted from scenes that are very dark under shadows or very washed out due to excessive sun reflectance. In this work, a discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based single-scale Retinex (SSR) technique is presented to extract the highest possible spatial details from the panchromatic image, and a minimum/maximum percent cutoff approach is used to preserve the most spectral information in the multispectral imagery. By fusing those two images, the typical bright target recovery (BTR) response can be avoided. Furthermore, to address the color distortion problem by the fusion process, a fast intensity hue saturation (IHS) image fusion technique with direct saturation stretching in RGB space is also proposed. To verify the efficacy of the proposed techniques, experiments are conducted using real IKONOS and QuickBird imagery covering different areas. Experimental results have shown that the perfect performance, maximizing increased details and minimizing color distortion, is achieved.