Contrast and Error-Based Fusion Schemes for Multispectral Image Pansharpening

The pansharpening process has the purpose of building a high-resolution multispectral image by fusing low spatial resolution multispectral and high-resolution panchromatic observations. A very credited method to pursue this goal relies upon the injection of details extracted from the panchromatic image into an upsampled version of the low-resolution multispectral image. In this letter, we compare two different injection methodologies and motivate the superiority of contrast-based methods both by physical consideration and by numerical tests carried out on remotely sensed data acquired by IKONOS and Quickbird sensors.