Panchromatic and multi-spectral image fusion for new satellites based on multi-channel deep model

With the launch and rapid development of new satellites such as WorldView-3, the bands number of multi-spectral images from new satellites is greatly increased. However, the spectral matching between the panchromatic image and multi-spectral images is deteriorated with the existing image fusion methods. In this paper, a novel method based on the multi-channel deep model is proposed to fuse images for new satellites. The deep model is implemented by convolutional neural networks and trained on each band to reduce the impact of spectral range mismatch. The proposed method also preserves the detailed information in multi-spectral images, which is ignored by the traditional methods. It also effectively alleviates the inconvenience for obtaining the remote sensing images by the data augmentation processing. In addition, it reduces the randomness of manual setting parameters using the parameter self-learning. Visual and quantitative assessments of fusion results show that the proposed method clearly improves the fusion quality compared to the state-of-the-art methods.