A new method for quality assessment of MS + pan fusion of quickbird and ikonos data

This paper focuses on quality assessment of fusion of multispectral (MS) images with high-resolution panchromatic (Pan) observations. A new quality index suitable for MS imagery having four spectral bands is defined from the theory of hypercomplex numbers, or quaternions. Both spectral and radiometric distortion measurements are encapsulated in a unique measurement, simultaneously accounting for local mean bias, changes in contrast and loss of correlation of individual bands, together with spectral distortion. Results are presented and discussed on very high-resolution QuickBird data, by means of comparisons between state-of-the-art and advanced MS+Pan merge algorithms.