Image fusion for classification of high resolution images based on mathematical morphology

Classification of high resolution urban remote sensing imagery is addressed. The classification is done by both considering the panchromatic imagery and the multi-spectral image obtained using the spectrally consistent fusion method introduced in [1]. The data are classified using support vector machines (SVM). To further enhance the classification accuracy, mathematical morphology is used to derive local spatial information from the panchromatic data. In particular we use the Morphological Profile (MP) in classification of satellite imagery as was proposed in [2, 3]. We also use the derivative of the MP (DMP). In the majority of the image fusion (pansharpening) techniques proposed today, there is a compromise between the spatial enhancement and the spectral consistency. By comparing classification results obtained by using our model based scheme [1] to results obtained using the IHS and Brovey fusion methods, we find that spectrally consistent data give better results when it comes to classification.