Analysis and selection of pan-sharpening assessment measures

Pan-sharpening of remote sensing multispectral imagery directly influences the accuracy of interpretation, classification, and other data mining methods. Different tasks of multispectral image analysis and processing require specific properties of input pan-sharpened multispectral data such as spectral and spatial consistency, complexity of the pan-sharpening method, and other properties. The quality of a pan-sharpened image is assessed using quantitative measures. Generally, the quantitative measures for pan-sharpening assessment are taken from other topics of image processing (e.g., image similarity indexes), but the applicability basis of these measures (i.e., whether a measure provides correct and undistorted assessment of pan-sharpened imagery) is not checked and proven. For example, should (or should not) a quantitative measure be used for pan-sharpening assessment is still an open research topic. Also, there is a chance that some measures can provide distorted results of the quality assessment and the suitability of these quantitative measures as well as the application for pan-sharpened imagery assessment is under question. The aim of the authors is to perform statistical analysis of widely employed measures for remote sensing imagery pan-sharpening assessment and to show which of the measures are the most suitable for use. To find and prove which measures are the most suitable, sets of multispectral images are processed by the general fusion framework method (GFF) with varying parameters. The GFF is a type of general image fusion method. Variation of the method parameter set values allows one to produce imagery data with predefined quality (i.e., spatial and spectral consistency) for further statistical analysis of the assessment measures. The use of several main multispectral sensors (Landsat 7 ETM + , IKONOS, and WorldView-2) imagery allows one to assess and compare available quality assessment measures and illustrate which of them are most suitable for each satellite. Experimental analysis illustrates adequate assessment decisions produced by the selected measures for the results of representative pan-sharpening methods.

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