Pansharpening Quality Assessment Using the Modulation Transfer Functions of Instruments

Quality assessment of pansharpening methods is not an easy task. Quality-assessment indexes, like Q4, spectral angle mapper, and relative global synthesis error, require a reference image at the same resolution as the fused image. In the absence of such a reference image, the quality of pansharpening is assessed at a degraded resolution only. The recently proposed index of Quality Not requiring a Reference (QNR) is one among very few tools available for assessing the quality of pansharpened images at the desired high resolution. However, it would be desirable to cross the outcomes of several independent quality-assessment indexes, in order to better determine the quality of pansharpened images. In this paper, we propose a method to assess fusion quality at the highest resolution, without requiring a high-resolution reference image. The novel method makes use of digital filters matching the modulation transfer functions (MTFs) of the imaging-instrument channels. Spectral quality is evaluated according to Wald's spectral consistency property. Spatial quality measures interscale changes by matching spatial details, extracted from the multispectral bands and from the panchromatic image by means of the high-pass complement of MTF filters. Eventually, we highlight the necessary and sufficient condition criteria for quality-assessment indexes by developing a pansharpening method optimizing the QNR spatial index and assessing the quality of fused images by using the proposed protocol.