A New Fusion Technique of Remote Sensing Images for Land Use/Cover

In China, accelerating industrialization and urbanization following high-speed economic development and population increases have greatly impacted land use/cover changes, making it imperative to obtain accurate and up to date information on changes so as to evaluate their environmental effects. The major purpose of this study was to develop a new method to fuse lower spatial resolution multispectral satellite images with higher spatial resolution panchromatic ones to assist in land use/cover mapping. An algorithm of a new fusion method known as edge enhancement intensity modulation (EEIM) was proposed to merge two optical image data sets of different spectral ranges. The results showed that the EEIM image was quite similar in color to lower resolution multispectral images, and the fused product was better able to preserve spectral information. Thus, compared to conventional approaches, the spectral distortion of the fused images was markedly reduced. Therefore, the EEIM fusion method could be utilized to fuse remote sensing data from the same or different sensors, including TM images and SPOT5 panchromatic images, providing high quality land use/cover images.