Improved IHS Algorithm for Fusing High Resolution Satellite Images of Urban Areas

The intensity-hue-saturation method is used frequently in image fusion due to its efficiency and high spatial quality. The main shortage is its spectral distortion stemmed from replacement of intensity band with higher resolution image. In this study, a new method is introduced to improve the spectral quality of the Intensity-Hue-Saturation (IHS) algorithm. The goal of this study is to produce the fused image that has a better spectral and spatial quality with respect to the original images in term of visual comparison and the classification result. In this regard, an improved statistical approach is developed to combine an intensity band from IHS algorithm and an input high resolution image such as SAR or Panchromatic image. Then the intensity image is replaced by the combined image band. Final fused images are attained using the inverse IHS algorithm. The proposed fusion algorithm is tested on two data sets of: a) panchromatic and multi spectral bands of IKONOS image with the same acquisition date, and b) multi spectral and HH bands of IKONOS and TerraSAR-X images respectively with different acquisition dates. Moreover, the obtained results are compared with other fusion methods like IHS, Gungor, Brovey and synthetic variable ratio. The results show less spectral discrepancy of the proposed method comparing to other methods. Finally, the outcome of proposed method is classified and classification overall accuracy is improved by 5.6 and 2 percentage for data set ‘a’ and ‘b’ respectively.