Curvelet fusion of panchromatic and SAR satellite imagery using fractional lower order moments

This paper presents a novel fusion method aimed at combining panchromatic and synthetic aperture radar(SAR) satellite imagery. The presented method seeks to combine the advantages of the two modalities while simultaneously minimizing the effect of artifacts inherent in SAR images. The alpha-stable distribution is used to model the curvelet decomposition coefficients of the image, as it caters for their heavy-tailed nature. Coefficients are fused using a weighted average rule with the saliency and match measures derived from the fractional lower-order moments of the alpha-stable distribution [3]. Experimental results show this method to provide high-quality results that improve the perceptive quality of the image without introducing any additional artifacts.