AN IMPROVED HIGH FREQUENCY MODULATING FUSION METHOD BASED ON MODULATION TRANSFER FUNCTION FILTERS

Abstract. GeoEye-1 is the most advanced and highest resolution commercial earth imaging satellite in the world today. It provides multispectral images (MS) and Panchromatic image (PAN) with spatial resolutions of 2.0 m and 0.5 m respectively. Image fusion is very important for mapping and image interpretation because it can take advantage of the complementary spatial/spectral resolution characteristics of remote sensing imagery. So an improved high frequency modulation fusion method based on MTF is proposed. Modulation transfer functions (MTF) are firstly measured from GeoEye-1 images, and then the degraded images based on MTF filters are obtained. Secondly, modulating parameter is obtained based on Minimum Mean Square Error, and image fusion is performed and measured in the degraded version. Finally, fused images with the high spatial resolution are produced by using the proposed method. Compared with fusion methods of weighted high passing filtering(w-HPF) in ERDAS IMAGINE and general image fusion based on MTF( MTF-GIF), The results of fused GeoEye-1 images show that the proposed method is an efficient way for GeoEye-1 image fusion, which can keep spectral information with the high spatial resolution.