A comparative data-fusion analysis of multi-sensor satellite images

Remote-sensing data play an important role in extracting information with the help of various sensors having different spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions. Therefore, data fusion, which merges images of different spatial and spectral resolutions, plays an important role in information extraction. This research investigates quality-assessment methods of multisensor (synthetic aperture radar [SAR] and optical) data fusion. In the analysis, three SAR data-sets from different sensors (RADARSAT-1, ALOS-PALSAR and ENVISAT-ASAR) and optical data from SPOT-2 were used. Although the PALSAR and the RADARSAT-1 images have the same resolutions and polarisations, images are gathered in different frequencies (L and C bands, respectively). The ASAR sensor also has C-band radar, but with lower (25 m) resolution. Since the frequency is a key factor for penetration depth, it is thought that the use of different SAR data might give interesting results as an output. This study describes a comparative study of multisensor fusion methods, namely the intensity-hue-saturation, Ehlers, and Brovey techniques, by using different statistical analysis techniques, namely the bias of mean, correlation coefficient, standard deviation difference and universal image quality index methods. The results reveal that Ehlers' method is superior to the others in terms of spectral and statistical fidelity.