Satellite image fusion using Fast Discrete Curvelet Transforms

Image fusion based on the Fourier and wavelet transform methods retain rich multispectral details but less spatial details from source images. Wavelets perform well only at linear features but not at non linear discontinuities because they do not use the geometric properties of structures. Curvelet transforms overcome such difficulties in feature representation. In this paper, we define a novel fusion rule via high pass modulation using Local Magnitude Ratio (LMR) in Fast Discrete Curvelet Transforms (FDCT) domain. For experimental study of this method Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) Resourcesat-1 LISS IV satellite sensor image of spatial resolution of 5.8m is used as low resolution (LR) multispectral image and Cartosat-1 Panchromatic (Pan) of spatial resolution 2.5m is used as high resolution (HR) Pan image. This fusion rule generates HR multispectral image at 2.5m spatial resolution. This method is quantitatively compared with Wavelet, Principal component analysis (PCA), High pass filtering(HPF), Modified Intensity-Hue-Saturation (M.IHS) and Grams-Schmidth fusion methods. Proposed method spatially outperform the other methods and retains rich multispectral details.