Toward reduction of artifacts in fused images

Most fusion satellite image methodologies at pixel-level introduce false spatial details, i.e. artifacts, in the resulting fused images. In many cases, these artifacts appears because image fusion methods do not consider the differences in roughness or textural characteristics between different land covers. They only consider the digital values associated with single pixels. This effect increases as the spatial resolution image increases. To minimize this problem, we propose a new paradigm based on local measurements of the fractal dimension (FD). Fractal dimension maps (FDMs) are generated for each of the source images (panchromatic and each band of the multi-spectral images) with the box-counting algorithm and by applying a windowing process. The average of source image FDMs, previously indexed between 0 and 1, has been used for discrimination of different land covers present in satellite images. This paradigm has been applied through the fusion methodology based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), using the à trous algorithm (WAT). Two different scenes registered by optical sensors on board FORMOSAT-2 and IKONOS satellites were used to study the behaviour of the proposed methodology. The implementation of this approach, using the WAT method, allows adapting the fusion process to the roughness and shape of the regions present in the image to be fused. This improves the quality of the fused images and their classification results when compared with the original WAT method.

Research highlights
► Fractal dimension maps applied to image fusion.
► Weighted the high spatial resolution data considering the roughness of surface cover.
► Evaluation of the quality of fusion image using quality indices, with a spatial distributed criteria.
► Multiscale image fusion.