FUSION OF HYPERSPECTRAL AND MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY WITH REGRESSION KRIGING AND THE LULU OPERATORS; A COMPARISON

Abstract. In this digital world, there is a large requirement of high resolution satellite image. Images at a low resolution may contain relevant information that has to be integrated with the high resolution image to obtain the required information. This is being fulfilled by image fusion. Image fusion is merging of different resolution images into a single image. The output image contains more information, as the information is integrated from both the images Image fusion was conducted with two different algorithms: regression kriging and the LULU operators. First, regression Kriging estimates the value of a dependent variable at unsampled location with the help of auxiliary variables. Here we used regression Kriging with the Hyperion image band as the response variables and the LISS III image bands are the explanatory variables. The fused image thus has the spectral variables from Hyperion image and the spatial variables from the LISS III image. Second, the LULU operator is an image processing methods that can be used as well in image fusion technique. Here we explored to fuse the Hyperion and LISS III image. The LULU operators work in three stages of the process, viz the decomposition stage, the fusion and the reconstruction stage. Quality aspects of the fused image for both techniques have been compared for spectral quality (correlation) and spatial quality (entropy). The study concludes that the quality of the fused image obtained with regression kriging is better than that obtained with the LULU operator.