Abstract: The fusion of panchromatic images and multi spectral ones is one of the most commonly-used methods to compose high-resolution color remote sensing images.In order to achieve high-quality color images,it is necessary to fuse the high spatial resolution of panchromatic images and preserve the spectral characteristics of multi spectral images.In this paper,a novel fusion method of remote sensing images on the basis of the IHS transform and the Curvelet transform is proposed to improve the quality of fusion images.In the method,first,the RGB multi spectral images are converted into the IHS images.Then,the panchromatic image and the I component refering to spatial resolution are handled through the Curvelet transform,and are fused by means of the standard difference method.Finally,the high-quality color images are achieved through the inverse transforms.Experimnetal results show that the images fused through the proposed method are superior to those through the other methods in terms of entropy,relatively-dimensionless global error and universal image quality index,and are equivalent to those through the wavelet transform and the PCA transform in terms of average gradient and correlation coefficient.Overall,the proposed method has better fusion performance than the other three typical methods.

Key words: image fusion, multi spectral image, panchromatic image, Curvelet transform, IHS transform