Multiscale directional bilateral filter based fusion of satellite images

The fusion of multispectral and panchromatic satellite images is widely used in remote sensing community to obtain high resolution images both in spatial and spectral domains. One approach is to obtain Panchromatic (PAN) image details through a multiresolution analysis (MRA) based decomposition such as wavelet transform and inject them to the low resolution Multispectral (MS) image. However, this process may lead to redundant detail injection, resulting to artifacts and overenhancement in the fusion results. In this paper, we propose a new fusion scheme based on the decomposition of the PAN image using a multidirectional bilateral filter. Obtained detail layers contain both resolution and direction information. By appropriate selection of these layers, it is possible to perform a proper detail injection. Visual and quantitative results for Quickbird images are presented to validate the proposed method.