COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT IMAGE FUSION TECHNIQUES FOR INDIVIDUAL TREE CROWN IDENTIFICATION USING QUICKBIRD IMAGES

摘要

With the advent of a new generation of high resolution satellites, images are now available with less than 1 meter spatial resolution in panchromatic mode. For successful individual tree crown identification it is desirable to have images with both high spatial and high spectral resolutions. Fusion techniques are being developed to combine the clear geometric features of the panchromatic image and the colour information of the multispectral image. This paper compares the results of three different pixel based fusion techniques PCA (Principal Component Analysis), Brovey transformation and Ehlers transformation used to merge the multispectral information and Panchromatic data of QuickBird satellite imagery. The comparison is done based on visual and statistical analysis of the results. The area of interest is situated in Zagros forests, in southwest of Shiraz, Iran. Visual and statistical quality assessment of fused images showed that the PCA method performs better than the others.