A new pansharpening algorithm based on total variation

In this letter, we present a new method for the pansharpening of multispectral satellite imagery. Pansharpening is the process of synthesizing a high spatial resolution multispectral image from a low spatial resolution multispectral image and a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. The method uses total variation to regularize an ill-posed problem dictated by a widely used explicit image formation model. This model is based on the assumptions that a linear combination of the bands of the pansharpened image gives the PAN image and that a decimation of the pansharpened image gives the original multispectral image. Experimental results are based on two real datasets and the quantitative quality of the pansharpened images is evaluated using a number of spatial and spectral metrics, some of which have been recently proposed and do not need a reference image. The proposed method compares favorably to other well-known methods for pansharpening and produces images of excellent spatial and spectral quality.