A new pansharpening method using multistage joint bilateral filtering

Due to the inaccuracy of detail extraction, most of pansharpening methods often suffer from spectral and/or spatial information distortions more or less and produce unsatisfied pansharpened results. To deal with this problem, we present a new pansharpening method using multistage joint bilateral filtering. Our method first separates the multispectral data into intensity and angular components by hyperspherical color transform (HCT). Then the proposed multistage joint bilateral filter is used to capture the different-scale details of both the panchromatic and the intensity images. Specifically, multistage joint bilateral filter performs joint bilateral filtering iteratively while the reference image remains unchanged and the filtering parameters vary progressively. The structure information with different scale is aware and the corresponding spatial details can be effectively extracted. The total spatial details are then combined and injected into the intensity component of the MS imagery. Finally, all the fused MS bands are obtained by the inverse HCT. The experiment is carried out on IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellite images, respectively. Visual and objective analysis show that our method can produce high-quality pansharpened results and outperform some existing methods.