Hyperspectral and Multispectral Image Fusion Using a Multi-Level Propagation Learning Network

Data fusion techniques have gained special interest in remote sensing due to the available capabilities to obtain measurements from the same scene using different instruments with varied resolution domains. In particular, multispectral (MS) and hyperspectral (HS) imaging fusion is used to generate high spatial and spectral images (HSEI). Deep learning data fusion models based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been developed to achieve such task.In this work, we present a Multi-Level Propagation Learning Network (MLPLN) based on a LSTM model but that can be trained with variable data sizes in order achieve the fusion process. Moreover, the MLPLN provides an intrinsic data augmentation feature that reduces the required number of training samples. The proposed model generates a HSEI by fusing a high-spatial resolution MS image and a low spatial resolution HS image. The performance of the model is studied and compared to existing CNN and LSTM approaches by evaluating the quality of the fused image using the structural similarity metric (SSIM). The results show that an increase in the SSIM is still obtained while reducing of the number of training samples to train the MLPLN model.