Fusion of multispectral and panchromatic satellite sensor imagery based on tailored filtering in the Fourier domain

A new methodology for fusing satellite sensor imagery, based on tailored filtering in the Fourier domain is proposed. Finite‐duration Impulse Response (FIR) filters have been designed through an objective criterion, which depends on source image characteristics only. The designed filters allow a weighted fusion of the information contained in a fine spatial resolution image (PAN) and in a multispectral image (MULTI), respectively, establishing a trade‐off between spatial and spectral quality of the resulting fused image. This new technique has been tested with Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) imagery. Spatial and spectral quality of the fused images was compared with the results provided by Mallat's Wavelet algorithm. The images fused by the proposed method were characterized by a spatial resolution very close to the PAN image, and by the spectral resolution of the MULTI image.