Image Simulation in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing is being actively researched in the fields of environment, military and urban planning through technologies such as monitoring of natural climate phenomena on the earth, land cover classification, and object detection. Recently, satellites equipped with observation cameras of various resolutions were launched, and remote sensing images are acquired by various observation methods including cluster satellites. However, the atmospheric and environmental conditions present in the observed scene degrade the quality of images or interrupt the capture of the Earth's surface information. One method to overcome this is by generating synthetic images through image simulation. Synthetic images can be generated by using statistical or knowledge-based models or by using spectral and optic-based models to create a simulated image in place of the unobtained image at a required time. Various proposed methodologies will provide economical utility in the generation of image learning materials and time series data through image simulation. The 6 published articles cover various topics and applications central to Remote sensing image simulation. Although submission to this Special Issue is now closed, the need for further in-depth research and development related to image simulation of High-spatial and spectral resolution, sensor fusion and colorization remains.I would like to take this opportunity to express my most profound appreciation to the MDPI Book staff, the editorial team of Applied Sciences journal, especially Ms. Nimo Lang, the assistant editor of this Special Issue, talented authors, and professional reviewers

Survey on wavelet based image fusion techniques

Image fusion is the process of combining multiple images into a single image without distortion or loss of information. The techniques related to image fusion are broadly classified as spatial and transform domain methods. In which, the transform domain based wavelet fusion techniques are widely used in different domains like medical, space and military for the fusion of multimodality or multi-focus images. In this paper, an overview of different wavelet transform based methods and its applications for image fusion are discussed and analysed

Pan-sharpening Using Spatial-frequency Method

Over the years, researchers have formulated various techniques for pan sharpening that attempt to minimize the spectral distortion, i.e., retain the maximum spectral fidelity of the MS images. On the other hand, if the use of the PAN-sharpened image is just to produce maps for better visual interpretation, then the spectral distortion is not of much concern, as the goal is to produce images with high contrast. To solve the color distortion problem, methods based on spatial frequency domain have been introduced and have demonstrated superior performance in terms of producing high spectral fidelity pan-sharpened images over spatial-scale methods

Probability-based Global Cross-modal Upsampling for Pansharpening

Pansharpening is an essential preprocessing step for remote sensing image processing. Although deep learning (DL) approaches performed well on this task, current upsampling methods used in these approaches only utilize the local information of each pixel in the low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) image while neglecting to exploit its global information as well as the cross-modal information of the guiding panchromatic (PAN) image, which limits their performance improvement. To address this issue, this paper develops a novel probability-based global cross-modal upsampling (PGCU) method for pan-sharpening. Precisely, we first formulate the PGCU method from a probabilistic perspective and then design an efficient network module to implement it by fully utilizing the information mentioned above while simultaneously considering the channel specificity. The PGCU module consists of three blocks, i.e., information extraction (IE), distribution and expectation estimation (DEE), and fine adjustment (FA). Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the PGCU method compared with other popular upsampling methods. Additionally, experiments also show that the PGCU module can help improve the performance of existing SOTA deep learning pansharpening methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zeyu-Zhu/PGCU.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Application of a wavelet transform for multispectral image fusion

Рассматривается метод слияния изображений одной и той же сцены, полученных в разных спектральных диапазонах, с формированием интегрированного монохромного изображения. Метод слияния основан на вейвлет-преобразовании исходных изображений. Предлагается стратегия объединения высокочастотных коэффициентов путём сравнения отношений их значений для всех исходных изображений. Процедура слияния не требует введения каких-либо пороговых значений и может выполняться для любого количества входных изображений. Предложенный алгоритм может быть использован в многоканальных оптико-электронных системах автоматической обработки изображений

Guided Nonlocal Patch Regularization and Efficient Filtering-Based Inversion for Multiband Fusion

In multiband fusion, an image with a high spatial and low spectral resolution is combined with an image with a low spatial but high spectral resolution to produce a single multiband image having high spatial and spectral resolutions. This comes up in remote sensing applications such as pansharpening~(MS+PAN), hyperspectral sharpening~(HS+PAN), and HS-MS fusion~(HS+MS). Remote sensing images are textured and have repetitive structures. Motivated by nonlocal patch-based methods for image restoration, we propose a convex regularizer that (i) takes into account long-distance correlations, (ii) penalizes patch variation, which is more effective than pixel variation for capturing texture information, and (iii) uses the higher spatial resolution image as a guide image for weight computation. We come up with an efficient ADMM algorithm for optimizing the regularizer along with a standard least-squares loss function derived from the imaging model. The novelty of our algorithm is that by expressing patch variation as filtering operations and by judiciously splitting the original variables and introducing latent variables, we are able to solve the ADMM subproblems efficiently using FFT-based convolution and soft-thresholding. As far as the reconstruction quality is concerned, our method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art variational and deep learning techniques.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imagin