Multispectral Image Pansharpening Based On The Contourlet Transform

Pansharpening is a technique that fuses the information of a low-resolution multispectral image and a high-resolution panchromatic image, usually remote sensing images, to provide a high-resolution multispectral image. In the literature, this task has been addressed from different points of view being one of the most popular wavelet-based algorithms.Recently, a new transform, the contourlet transform, has been proposed. This transform combines the advantages of the wavelets transform, with a more efficient directional information representation. The result is a flexible multiscale, multidirection and shift-invariant decomposition that can be efficiently implemented via the a'trous algorithm.In this chapter, we compare the wavelet-based pansharpening with existing contourlet-based approaches and propose a new pansharpening method based on the contourlet transform. The performance of the contourlet in general, and the proposed method in particular, is assessed numerically and visually for Landsat and SPOT images.