A variational approach for pan-sharpening

Pan-sharpening is a process of acquiring a high resolution multispectral (MS) image by combining a low resolution MS image with a corresponding high resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. In this paper, we propose a new variational pan-sharpening method based on three basic assumptions: 1) the gradient of PAN image could be a linear combination of those of the pan-sharpened image bands; 2) the upsampled low resolution MS image could be a degraded form of the pan-sharpened image; and 3) the gradient in the spectrum direction of pan-sharpened image should be approximated to those of the upsampled low resolution MS image. An energy functional, whose minimizer is related to the best pan-sharpened result, is built based on these assumptions. We discuss the existence of minimizer of our energy and describe the numerical procedure based on the split Bregman algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare it with some state-of-the-art schemes using QuickBird and IKONOS data. Particularly, we classify the existing quantitative measures into four categories and choose two representatives in each category for more reasonable quantitative evaluation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method in terms of the related evaluation benchmarks. Besides, the computation efficiency comparison with other variational methods also shows that our method is remarkable.