Multi-spectral and hyperspectral image fusion using 3-D wavelet transform

Image fusion is performed between one band of multi-spectral image and two bands of hyperspectral image to produce fused image with the same spatial resolution as source multi-spectral image and the same spectral resolution as source hyperspectral image. According to the characteristics and 3-Dimensional (3-D) feature analysis of multi-spectral and hyperspectral image data volume, the new fusion approach using 3-D wavelet based method is proposed. This approach is composed of four major procedures: Spatial and spectral resampling, 3-D wavelet transform, wavelet coefficient integration and 3-D inverse wavelet transform. Especially, a novel method, Ratio Image Based Spectral Resampling (RIBSR) method, is proposed to accomplish data resampling in spectral domain by utilizing the property of ratio image. And a new fusion rule, Average and Substitution (A&S) rule, is employed as the fusion rule to accomplish wavelet coefficient integration. Experimental results illustrate that the fusion approach using 3-D wavelet transform can utilize both spatial and spectral characteristics of source images more adequately and produce fused image with higher quality and fewer artifacts than fusion approach using 2-D wavelet transform. It is also revealed that RIBSR method is capable of interpolating the missing data more effectively and correctly, and A&S rule can integrate coefficients of source images in 3-D wavelet domain to preserve both spatial and spectral features of source images more properly.