Multi-spectral and panchromatic images fusion based on PCA and fractional spline wavelet

A fusion method of panchromatic and multi-spectral (MS) images based on fractional spline wavelet and principal component analysis (PCA) transformation is proposed. The family of fractional spline wavelets outperforms traditional wavelets in obtaining the texture information of images due to its fractional order of approximation, which is beneficial for image fusion. Fusion experiments taking the instance of two image data sets collected by Landsat-TM and IKONOS are carried out in this article. The mean universal quality indices (MUQs) of the three red, green, blue (RGB) channels of the proposed method are 0.8866 and 0.9259 compared to the traditional PCA fusion method with MUQ = 0.8279 and 0.8496. From the visual evaluation and numerical analysis, it can be confirmed that the proposed method is a superior technique for enhancing the spatial details of MS images with their spectral properties reliably preserved.