Fusion of Multispectral and Panchromatic Images Based on Morphological Operators

Nonlinear decomposition schemes constitute an alternative to classical approaches for facing the problem of data fusion. In this paper, we discuss the application of this methodology to a popular remote sensing application called pansharpening, which consists in the fusion of a low resolution multispectral image and a high-resolution panchromatic image. We design a complete pansharpening scheme based on the use of morphological half gradient operators and demonstrate the suitability of this algorithm through the comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches. Four data sets acquired by the Pleiades, Worldview-2, Ikonos, and Geoeye-1 satellites are employed for the performance assessment, testifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach in producing top-class images with a setting independent of the specific sensor.