Feasibility of multispectral and synthetic aperture radar image fusion

The principles of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical sensors are different and their detection capabilities often compliment each other. Traditional methods which use SAR image to replace optical band could not achieve desired results. A new fusion method making a special calculation on SAR image has been established in this paper. The results of applying to fully polarimetric RADARSAT-2 images with Landsat TM images are analyzed and illustrated. As a rule to value the fusion results, the objective evaluation indexes of different fusion methods were compared. The results showed that the capability of image generated by principal component analysis (PCA) fusion method is improved both in spectral and spatial information. The fusion scheme in this paper can improve the fusion effect significantly.