A wavelet-based quality measure for evaluating the degradation of pan-sharpened images due to local contrast inversion

Abstract

Pan-sharpened images can effectively be used in various remote sensing applications. During recent years a vast number of pan-sharpening algorithms has been proposed. Thus, the evaluation of their performance became a vital issue. The quality assessment of pan-sharpened images is complicated by the absence of reference data, the ideal image what the multispectral scanner would observe if it had as high spatial resolution as the panchromatic instrument. This paper presents a novel method to evaluate the degree of local quality degradation in pan-sharpened images, which is the result of contrast inversion of the fusing bands. The proposed method does not require a reference image. Firstly, the algorithm identifies the areas in which the contrast inversion may be confidently detected. Then, based on the found spatial consistency violations, the quantitative degradation index is calculated for the fused product. The proposed approach was validated with the use of very high resolution optical imagery. The experiments have shown that the proposed measure objectively reflects local quality deterioration of pan-sharpened images. 2010 SPIE-IS&T.