Improving high-pass fusion method using wavelets

TL;DR

This paper proposes replacing the boxcar filter in high-pass fusion with wavelet transforms to reduce ringing effects, resulting in improved image fusion quality.

Contribution

It introduces a wavelet-based high-pass fusion method that outperforms traditional techniques like Brovey, IHS, and PCA in preserving image quality.

Findings

Wavelet transform reduces ringing artifacts.

Proposed method achieves higher correlation coefficient.

Mutual information is improved with the new approach.

Abstract

In an appropriate image fusion method, spatial information of the panchromatic image is injected into the multispectral images such that the spectral information is not distorted. The high-pass modulation method is a successful method in image fusion. However, the main drawback of this method is that this technique uses the boxcar filter to extract the high frequency information of the panchromatic image. Using the boxcar filter introduces the ringing effect into the fused image. To cope with this problem, we use the wavelet transform instead of boxcar filters. Then, the results of the proposed method and those of other methods such as, Brovey, IHS, and PCA ones are compared. Experiments show the superiority of the proposed method in terms of correlation coefficient and mutual information.