Remote-sensing image fusion based on curvelets and ICA

Improving the quality of pan-sharpened multispectral (MS) bands is the main aim of the recent research on pan-sharpening. In this article, we present a novel image fusion method based on combining the curvelet transform and independent component analysis (ICA). The idea is to map the MS bands onto a statistically independent domain to determine the intensity component, which contains the common information of the MS bands, and then to pan-sharpen it using curvelets and a modified adaptive fusion rule. The proposed method is evaluated by visual and statistical analyses and compared with the curvelet (CVT)-based method using a context-based decision model, the CVT-based method using the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory, the improved ICA method, and the combined adaptive principle component analysis (PCA)–Contourlet method. The experimental results using QuickBird and WorldView-2 data show that the proposed method effectively reduces the spectral distortion while injecting spatial details into the fused bands as much as possible.