Fusing Multiple Multiband Images

High-resolution hyperspectral images are in great demand but hard to acquire due to several existing fundamental and technical limitations. A practical way around this is to fuse multiple multiband images of the same scene with complementary spatial and spectral resolutions. We propose an algorithm for fusing an arbitrary number of coregistered multiband, i.e., panchromatic, multispectral, or hyperspectral, images through estimating the endmember and their abundances in the fused image. To this end, we use the forward observation and linear mixture models and formulate an appropriate maximum-likelihood estimation problem. Then, we regularize the problem via a vector total-variation penalty and the non-negativity/sum-to-one constraints on the endmember abundances and solve it using the alternating direction method of multipliers. The regularization facilitates exploiting the prior knowledge that natural images are mostly composed of piecewise smooth regions with limited abrupt changes, i.e., edges, as well as coping with potential ill-posedness of the fusion problem. Experiments with multiband images constructed from real-world hyperspectral images reveal the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms, which need to be used in tandem to fuse more than two multiband images.