Abstract

Remote sensing images with different spatial and spectral resolution, such as panchromatic (PAN) images and multispectral (MS) images, can be captured by many earth-observing satellites. Normally, PAN images possess high spatial resolution but low spectral resolution, while MS images have high spectral resolution with low spatial resolution.

In order to integrate spatial and spectral information contained in the PAN and MS images, image fusion techniques are commonly adopted to generate remote sensing images at both high spatial and spectral resolution. In this study, based on the deep convolutional neural network, a remote sensing image fusion method that can adequately extract spectral and spatial features from source images is proposed. The major innovation of this study is that the proposed fusion method contains a two branches network with the deeper structure which can capture salient features of the MS and PAN images separately.

Besides, the residual learning is adopted in our network to thoroughly study the relationship between the high- and low-resolution MS images. The proposed method mainly consists of two procedures. First, spatial and spectral features are respectively extracted from the MS and PAN images by convolutional layers with different depth. Second, the feature fusion procedure utilizes the extracted features from the former step to yield fused images. By evaluating the performance on the QuickBird and Gaofen-1 images, our proposed method provides better results compared with other classical methods.