A novel remote-sensing image fusion method based on hybrid visual saliency analysis

In practical applications, different regions in images may practically have different demands for the spatial and spectral resolution. However, most existing methods execute a unified fusion processing of the whole image with no consideration of such diverse demands. In this article, a new fusion method for remote-sensing images based on saliency analysis is proposed for addressing the issue. By introducing the hybrid visual saliency analysis, regions in the panchromatic (Pan) image and multispectral image would be automatically partitioned into two parts: salient and non-salient regions. Then, a sub-region fusion strategy is applied to fuse the non-salient and salient regions, respectively. As for salient regions such as residential areas and roads, the adaptive intensity-hue-saturation (adaptive IHS) method is implemented for its merit of effective improvement in spatial quality. For non-salient regions such as farmland, forest, and grassland, the dual-tree complex wavelet transform is used in the process of spatial detail extraction, and the combination coefficients yielded by the adaptive IHS method are integrated to suppress the spectral distortion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposal provides state-of-the-art performance as well as achieves a better balance between spatial injection and spectral maintenance in different regions.