Evaluation of the quality of Quickbird fused products

R. Alonso Reyes (1) , M.J. Gutierrez (1) , S. Fernandez (1) , Claire Thomas (2) , Thierry Ranchin (2) , Lucien Wald (3)

1 INTA - Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial
2 CEP - Centre Énergétique et Procédés
3 CEP/Sophia

Most of the satellite sensors, presently operating in the optical domain, are providing a data set comprising multispectral images at a low spatial resolution and images at a higher spatial resolution but with a lower spectral content. The trend of satellite sensors is similar to the present situation. The idea of fusing multispectral images with a highest spatial resolution enables the creation of useful products for a set of applications. This paper aims at evaluating a set of methods for construction of synthetic multispectral images having a highest spatial resolution available within the data set. These methods are evaluated through the construction of fused products from a set of Quickbird panchromatic and multispectral images. Of interest are the most used methods: the Intensity-Hue-Saturation method, the Brovey transform, the multiplicative methods and a set of methods derived from the ARSIS concept. The different methods are shortly presented. These methods are tested in a dataset from the area of Madrid. The dataset proposed a good diversity of landscape allowing the measure of the impact of fusion methods on different cases. The resulting images are evaluated through visual criteria from a set of photointerpreters. They classified the fused products and pro-vided a ranking for the visual quality. Then the proposed protocol defined by Wald et al. (1997) is applied to all methods. A set of quantitative parameters is computed allowing an objective comparison of the results. Finally a new parameter allowing the quantification of the information brought by the fusion method is proposed. This parameter is based on the analysis of the difference of the real structures of a multispectral image and of the computed structures of the fused products. It is applied to the different methods and favors the evaluation of the impact of an algorithm on the resulting images. Some conclusions are drawn on the ranking of the different methods and on the appropriate parameters for the evaluation of the quality of fused products.

Mots clés: remote sensing; ARSIS; data fusion; satellite; images

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

R. Alonso Reyes, M.J. Gutierrez, S. Fernandez, Claire Thomas, Thierry Ranchin, et al.. Evaluation of the quality of Quickbird fused products. 24th EARSeL Symposium “New Strategies for European Remote Sensing”, May 2004, Dubrovnik, Croatia. pp.343-351. ⟨hal-00395059⟩