Quality assessment of Ikonos and Quickbird fused images for urban mapping

New series of very high spatial resolution (VHR) satellites Ikonos and Quickbird have enabled mapping and updating of GIS databases of urban areas that is presently carried out using field surveys and aerial images. Satellites provide higher spatial resolution in panchromatic (PAN) mode compared to that in multispectral (MS) mode. High spatial and high spectral resolution are desirable for urban mapping as high spatial resolution provides better geometric quality while high spectral resolution provides better object identification. Image fusion techniques aim at increasing the spatial resolution of MS images using information from PAN image. In this study, fused images obtained for Ikonos PAN and MS and Quickbird PAN and MS images by the standard methods namely IHS (Intensity-Hue-Saturation) and PCA (Principal Component Analysis), and simple wavelet methods namely, IHS with wavelet (IHS+W), PCA with wavelet (PCA+W), Wavelet Addition (WA) and Wavelet Substitution (WS) and complex ARSIS ("Amelioration de la Resolution Spatiale par Injection of Structures") methods are compared and analysed visually and statistically for urban mapping. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...