Bilateral filtering-based enhanced pansharpening of multispectral satellite images

An efficient pansharpening method should inject the missing geometric information to the multispectral (MS) image while preserving its radiometric information. Widely used additive wavelet transform-based pansharpening methods extract the missing high-frequency information by decomposing the panchromatic (PAN) image and adding the detail layers to the low-resolution MS (LRM) image. However, this approach causes a redundant detail injection, leading to artifacts in the fusion result. In this letter, we propose to decompose the high-resolution-PAN image using an edge-preserving decomposition which will decrease the amount of redundant high-frequency injection. The missing high-frequency information of the LRM image is obtained by the decomposition of the PAN image using a multiscale bilateral filter. The spatial and range parameters of the bilateral filter are optimized so as to enhance spatial and spectral metrics. The fusion results are compared with the widely used additive wavelet luminance proportional (AWLP) and recently proposed improved AWLP fusion methods. The resulting images as well as evaluation metrics demonstrate that the proposed injection approach has better performance.