The use of disparate data sources within a pixel level image fusion procedure has been well documented for pan-sharpening studies. The present paper explores various image fusion procedures for the fusion of multi-spectral ASTER data and a RadarSAT-1 SAR scene. The research sought to determine which fusion procedure merged the largest amount of SAR texture into the ASTER scenes, while also preserving the spectral content. An additional application based maximum likelihood classification assessment was also undertaken. Three SAR scenes were tested namely, one backscatter scene and two textural measures calculated using grey level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM). Each of these were fused to the ASTER data using the following established approaches; Brovey transformation, Intensity Hue and Saturation, Principal Component Substitution, Discrete wavelet transformation, and a modified discrete wavelet transformation using the IHS approach. Resulting data sets were assessed using qualitative and quantitative (entropy, universal image quality index, maximum likelihood classification) approaches. Results from the study indicated that while all post fusion data sets contained more information (entropy analysis), only the frequency-based fusion approaches managed to preserve the spectral quality of the original imagery. Furthermore results also indicated that the textural (mean, contrast) SAR scenes did not add any significant amount of information to the post-fusion imagery. Classification accuracy was not improved when comparing ASTER optical data and pseudo optical bands generated from the fusion analysis. Accuracies range from 68.4% for the ASTER data to well below 50% for the component substitution methods. Frequency based approaches also returned lower accuracies when compared to the unfused optical data. The present study essentially replicated (pan-sharpening) studies using the high resolution SAR scene as a pseudo panchromatic band.

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