Remote Sensing Image Fusion Based on Nonlinear IHS and Fast Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform

The purpose of remote sensing image fusion is to inject the detail image extracted from the panchromatic (PAN) image into the low spatial resolution multispectral (MS) image. A novel remote sensing image fusion method based on fast nonsubsampled contourlet transform (FNSCT) and Nonlinear intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) is presented in this paper. Firstly, the Nonlinear IHS transform is performed on the multispectral image, and then the I-component representing the spatial resolution and the panchromatic image is transformed by NSCT to obtain the low frequency and high frequency. Finally, the coefficients are selected using the improved sum-modified-Laplacian (SML) method and the improved Log-Gabor filter in the low frequency and the high frequency, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method is the most advanced fusion method in subjective and objective evaluation, can provide more spatial information, and retain more spectral information compared with several other methods.