THE INFLUENCE OF SPECTRAL WAVELENGTH ON THE QUALITY OF PANSHARPENED IMAGE SIMULATED USING HYPERSPECTRAL DATA

Abstract. Preservation of the spectral characteristics in multispectral images is important in the development of pansharpening methods because it affects the accuracy of subsequent applications, such as visual interpretation, land cover classification, and change detection. The combinations of the spectral properties (observation wavelength and width of spectral bands) of multispectral and panchromatic images affect both the spatial and spectral quality of pansharpened images. Therefore, the clarification of the relations between spectral bands and quality of pansharpened image is important for improving our understanding of pansharpening methods, and for developing better schemes for image fusion. This study investigated the influence of the spectral waveband of panchromatic images on the image quality of multispectral (MS) images using simulated images produced from hyperspectral data. Panchromatic images with different spectral band position and multispectral images with degraded spatial resolution were generated from airborne visible/infrared imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS) images and pansharpened using seven methods: additive wavelet intensity, additive wavelet principal component, generalized Laplacian pyramid with spectral distortion minimization, generalized intensity-huesaturation (GIHS) transform, GIHS adaptive, Gram–Schmidt spectral sharpening, and block-based synthetic variable ratio. The pansharpened near-infrared band was visually and statistically compared with the non-degraded image. Wide variation in quality was identified visually within and between methods depending on the spectral wavelengths of the panchromatic images. Quantitative evaluations using three frequently used indices, the correlation coefficient, erreur relative globale adimensionnelle de synthèse (ERGAS), and the Q index, showed the individual behaviors of the pansharpening methods in terms of the spectral similarity in panchromatic and near-infrared, though all methods had similar qualities in the case with the lowest similarity. These findings are discussed in terms of the fundamentals and structures of the methods.