Pansharpening: Context-Based Generalized Laplacian Pyramids by Robust Regression

Pansharpening refers to the combination of panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images, designed to obtain a fused product retaining the fine spatial resolution of the former and the high spectral content of the latter. One of the most popular and successful approaches to pansharpening is the method known as context-based generalized Laplacian pyramid, which requires as a key ingredient for the estimation of the so-called injection coefficients. In this article, we propose the adoption of robust techniques for the estimation of the injection coefficients and detection strategies to select the clusters for which robust regression is needed, providing a suitable balancing between fusion performance and computational burden. Experimental results conducted on five real data sets acquired by the sensors QuickBird, WorldView-3, and WorldView-4, show the superiority of the proposed method with respect to current state-of-the-art pansharpening techniques.