Data Fusion Techniques for Processing Aerospace Remote Sensing Electro-Optical Data

This paper deals with data fusion between different resolution multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (Pan) images in order to obtain high spatial resolution MS images. A survey is provided about the state-of-the-art data fusion techniques and synthesized product's quality assessment criteria. Several fusion algorithms and quality indexes were implemented in a Toolbox with a graphical user interface developed in MATLAB environment, namely Fusion Tool Box (FTB), developed to obtain experimental results. The analysis performed through FTB on two different data sets was oriented to validate the theoretical analysis and to perform a quantitative comparison among fusion algorithms for several applications. Results allow a first level evaluation of advantages and drawbacks of the various techniques for specific applications.