FUSION OF LANDSAT- 8 THERMAL INFRARED AND VISIBLE BANDS WITH MULTI-RESOLUTION ANALYSIS CONTOURLET METHODS

Abstract. Land surface temperature image is an important product in many lithosphere and atmosphere applications. This image is retrieved from the thermal infrared bands. These bands have lower spatial resolution than the visible and near infrared data. Therefore, the details of temperature variation can't be clearly identified in land surface temperature images. The aim of this study is to enhance spatial information in thermal infrared bands. Image fusion is one of the efficient methods that are employed to enhance spatial resolution of the thermal bands by fusing these data with high spatial resolution visible bands. Multi-resolution analysis is an effective pixel level image fusion approach. In this paper, we use contourlet, non-subsampled contourlet and sharp frequency localization contourlet transform in fusion due to their advantages, high directionality and anisotropy. The absolute average difference and RMSE values show that with small distortion in the thermal content, the spatial information of the thermal infrared and the land surface temperature images is enhanced.