Pansharpening using total variation regularization

In remote sensing, pansharpening refers to the technique that combines the complementary spectral and spatial resolution characteristics of a multispectral image and a panchromatic image, with the objective to generate a high-resolution color image. This paper presents a new pansharpening method based on the minimization of a variant of total variation. We consider the fusion problem as the colorization of each pixel in the panchromatic image. A new term concerning the gradient of the panchromatic image is introduced in the functional of total variation so as to preserve edges. Experimental results on IKONOS satellite images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.