Advantages of nonlinear intensity components for contrast-based multispectral pansharpening

In this study, we investigate whether a nonlinear intensity component can be beneficial for multispectral (MS) pansharpening based on component-substitution (CS). In classical CS methods, the intensity component is a linear combination of the spectral components and lies on a hyperplane in the vector space that contains the MS pixel values. Starting from the hyperspherical color space (HCS) fusion technique, we devise a novel method, in which the intensity component lies on a hyper-ellipsoidal surface instead of on a hyperspherical surface. The proposed method is insensitive to the format of the data, either floating-point spectral radiance values or fixed-point packed digital numbers (DNs), thanks to the use of a multivariate linear regression between the squares of the interpolated MS bands and the squared lowpass filtered Pan. The regression of squared MS, instead of the Euclidean radius used by HCS, makes the intensity component no longer lie on a hypersphere in the vector space of the MS samples, but on a hyperellipsoid. Furthermore, before the fusion is accomplished, the interpolated MS bands are corrected for atmospheric haze, in order to build a multiplicative injection model with approximately de-hazed components. Experiments on GeoEye-1 and WorldView-3 images show consistent advantages over the baseline HCS and a performance slightly superior to those of some of the most advanced methodsPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Super Resolution of Wavelet-Encoded Images and Videos

In this dissertation, we address the multiframe super resolution reconstruction problem for wavelet-encoded images and videos. The goal of multiframe super resolution is to obtain one or more high resolution images by fusing a sequence of degraded or aliased low resolution images of the same scene. Since the low resolution images may be unaligned, a registration step is required before super resolution reconstruction. Therefore, we first explore in-band (i.e. in the wavelet-domain) image registration; then, investigate super resolution. Our motivation for analyzing the image registration and super resolution problems in the wavelet domain is the growing trend in wavelet-encoded imaging, and wavelet-encoding for image/video compression. Due to drawbacks of widely used discrete cosine transform in image and video compression, a considerable amount of literature is devoted to wavelet-based methods. However, since wavelets are shift-variant, existing methods cannot utilize wavelet subbands efficiently. In order to overcome this drawback, we establish and explore the direct relationship between the subbands under a translational shift, for image registration and super resolution. We then employ our devised in-band methodology, in a motion compensated video compression framework, to demonstrate the effective usage of wavelet subbands. Super resolution can also be used as a post-processing step in video compression in order to decrease the size of the video files to be compressed, with downsampling added as a pre-processing step. Therefore, we present a video compression scheme that utilizes super resolution to reconstruct the high frequency information lost during downsampling. In addition, super resolution is a crucial post-processing step for satellite imagery, due to the fact that it is hard to update imaging devices after a satellite is launched. Thus, we also demonstrate the usage of our devised methods in enhancing resolution of pansharpened multispectral images

DDRF: Denoising Diffusion Model for Remote Sensing Image Fusion

Denosing diffusion model, as a generative model, has received a lot of attention in the field of image generation recently, thanks to its powerful generation capability. However, diffusion models have not yet received sufficient research in the field of image fusion. In this article, we introduce diffusion model to the image fusion field, treating the image fusion task as image-to-image translation and designing two different conditional injection modulation modules (i.e., style transfer modulation and wavelet modulation) to inject coarse-grained style information and fine-grained high-frequency and low-frequency information into the diffusion UNet, thereby generating fused images. In addition, we also discussed the residual learning and the selection of training objectives of the diffusion model in the image fusion task. Extensive experimental results based on quantitative and qualitative assessments compared with benchmarks demonstrates state-of-the-art results and good generalization performance in image fusion tasks. Finally, it is hoped that our method can inspire other works and gain insight into this field to better apply the diffusion model to image fusion tasks. Code shall be released for better reproducibility

Remote sensing image fusion via compressive sensing

In this paper, we propose a compressive sensing-based method to pan-sharpen the low-resolution multispectral (LRM) data, with the help of high-resolution panchromatic (HRP) data. In order to successfully implement the compressive sensing theory in pan-sharpening, two requirements should be satisfied: (i) forming a comprehensive dictionary in which the estimated coefficient vectors are sparse; and (ii) there is no correlation between the constructed dictionary and the measurement matrix. To fulfill these, we propose two novel strategies. The first is to construct a dictionary that is trained with patches across different image scales. Patches at different scales or equivalently multiscale patches provide texture atoms without requiring any external database or any prior atoms. The redundancy of the dictionary is removed through K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD). Second, we design an iterative l1-l2 minimization algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to seek the sparse coefficient vectors. The proposed algorithm stacks missing high-resolution multispectral (HRM) data with the captured LRM data, so that the latter is used as a constraint for the estimation of the former during the process of seeking the representation coefficients. Three datasets are used to test the performance of the proposed method. A comparative study between the proposed method and several state-of-the-art ones shows its effectiveness in dealing with complex structures of remote sensing imagery

Recent Advances in Image Restoration with Applications to Real World Problems

In the past few decades, imaging hardware has improved tremendously in terms of resolution, making widespread usage of images in many diverse applications on Earth and planetary missions. However, practical issues associated with image acquisition are still affecting image quality. Some of these issues such as blurring, measurement noise, mosaicing artifacts, low spatial or spectral resolution, etc. can seriously affect the accuracy of the aforementioned applications. This book intends to provide the reader with a glimpse of the latest developments and recent advances in image restoration, which includes image super-resolution, image fusion to enhance spatial, spectral resolution, and temporal resolutions, and the generation of synthetic images using deep learning techniques. Some practical applications are also included

Panchromatic and multispectral image fusion for remote sensing and earth observation: Concepts, taxonomy, literature review, evaluation methodologies and challenges ahead

Panchromatic and multispectral image fusion, termed pan-sharpening, is to merge the spatial and spectral information of the source images into a fused one, which has a higher spatial and spectral resolution and is more reliable for downstream tasks compared with any of the source images. It has been widely applied to image interpretation and pre-processing of various applications. A large number of methods have been proposed to achieve better fusion results by considering the spatial and spectral relationships among panchromatic and multispectral images. In recent years, the fast development of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) has significantly enhanced the development of pan-sharpening techniques. However, this field lacks a comprehensive overview of recent advances boosted by the rise of AI and DL. This paper provides a comprehensive review of a variety of pan-sharpening methods that adopt four different paradigms, i.e., component substitution, multiresolution analysis, degradation model, and deep neural networks. As an important aspect of pan-sharpening, the evaluation of the fused image is also outlined to present various assessment methods in terms of reduced-resolution and full-resolution quality measurement. Then, we conclude this paper by discussing the existing limitations, difficulties, and challenges of pan-sharpening techniques, datasets, and quality assessment. In addition, the survey summarizes the development trends in these areas, which provide useful methodological practices for researchers and professionals. Finally, the developments in pan-sharpening are summarized in the conclusion part. The aim of the survey is to serve as a referential starting point for newcomers and a common point of agreement around the research directions to be followed in this exciting area

Information Loss-Guided Multi-Resolution Image Fusion

Spatial downscaling is an ill-posed, inverse problem, and information loss (IL) inevitably exists in the predictions produced by any downscaling technique. The recently popularized area-to-point kriging (ATPK)-based downscaling approach can account for the size of support and the point spread function (PSF) of the sensor, and moreover, it has the appealing advantage of the perfect coherence property. In this article, based on the advantages of ATPK and the conceptualization of IL, an IL-guided image fusion (ILGIF) approach is proposed. ILGIF uses the fine spatial resolution images acquired in other wavelengths to predict the IL in ATPK predictions based on the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, which accounts for the spatial variation in land cover. ILGIF inherits all the advantages of ATPK, and its prediction has perfect coherence with the original coarse spatial resolution data which can be demonstrated mathematically. ILGIF was validated using two data sets and was shown in each case to predict downscaled images more accurately than the compared benchmark methods

Image Fusion in Remote Sensing and Quality Evaluation of Fused Images

In remote sensing, acquired optical images of high spectral resolution have usually a lower spatial resolution than images of lower spectral resolution. This is due to physical, cost and complexity constraints. To make the most of the available imagery, many image fusion techniques have been developed to address this problem. Image fusion is an ill-posed inverse problem where an image of low spatial resolution and high spectral resolution is enhanced in spatial-resolution by using an auxiliary image of high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution. It is assumed that both images display the same scene and are properly co-registered. Thus, the problem is essentially to transfer details from the higher spatial resolution auxiliary image to the upscaled lower resolution image in a manner that minimizes the spatial and spectral distortion of the fused image. The most common image fusion problem is pansharpening, where a multispectral (MS) image is enhanced using wide-band panchromatic (PAN) image. A similar problem is the enhancement of a hyperspectral (HS) image by either a PAN image or an MS image. As there is no reference image available, the reliable quantitative evaluation of the quality of the fused image is a difficult problem. This thesis addresses the image fusion problem in three different ways and also addresses the problem of quantitative quality evaluation.Í fjarkönnun hafa myndir með háa rófsupplausn lægri rúmupplausn en myndir með lægri rófsupplausn vegna eðlisfræðilegra og kostnaðarlegra takmarkana. Til að auka upplýsingamagn slíkra mynda hafa verið þróaðar fjölmargar sambræðsluaðferðir á síðustu tveimur áratugum. Myndsambræðsla er illa framsett andhverft vandmál (e. inverse problem) þar sem rúmupplausn myndar af hárri rófsupplausn er aukin með því að nota upplýsingar frá mynd af hárri rúmupplausn og lægri rófsupplausn. Það er gert ráð fyrir að báðar myndir sýni nákvæmlega sama landsvæði. Þannig er vandamálið í eðli sínu að flytja fíngerða eiginleika myndar af hærri rúmupplausn yfir á mynd af lægri rúmupplausn sem hefur verið brúuð upp í stærð hinnar myndarinnar, án þess að skerða gæði rófsupplýsinga upphaflegu myndarinnar. Algengasta myndbræðsluvandamálið í fjarkönnun er svokölluð panskerpun (e. pansharpening) þar sem fjölrásamynd (e. multispectral image) er endurbætt í rúmi með svokallaðri víðbandsmynd (e. panchromatic image) sem hefur aðeins eina rás af hárri upplausn. Annað svipað vandamál er sambræðsla háfjölrásamyndar (e. hyperspectral image) og annaðhvort fjölrásamyndar eða víðbandsmyndar. Þar sem myndsambræðsla er andhverft vandmál er engin háupplausnar samanburðarmynd tiltæk, sem gerir mat á gæðum sambræddu myndarinnar að erfiðu vandamáli. Í þessari ritgerð eru kynntar þrjár aðferðir sem taka á myndsambræðlsu og einnig er fjallað um mat á gæðum sambræddra mynda, þá sérstaklega panskerptra mynda