Image Fusion Based on Kernel Estimation and Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper reports the improvement of the image quality during the fusion of remote sensing images by minimizing a novel energy function. First, by introducing a gradient constraint term in the energy function, the spatial information of the panchromatic image is transferred to the fused results. Second, the spectral information of the multispectral image is preserved by importing a kernel function to the data fitting term in the energy function. Finally, an objective parameter selection method based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed to integrate state-of-the-art image quality metrics. Visual perception measurement and selected fusion metrics are employed to evaluate the fusion performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other established image fusion techniques.