Fusion of panchromatic and multispectral images using multiscale dual bilateral filter

This paper presents a novel method based on the developed multiscale dual bilateral filter to fuse high spatial resolution panchromatic image and high spectral resolution multispectral image. Compared with traditional multi-resolution based methods, the process of detail extraction considers the characteristics of panchromatic image and multispectral image simultaneously. The low resolution multispectral image is resampled to the same size of the high resolution panchromatic image and sharpened through injecting the extracted details. The proposed fusion method is tested over QuickBird and IKONOS images and compared with three popular methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional methods.