A pyramid approach to fusion of Landsat TM and SPOT-PAN data to yield multispectral high-resolution images for environmental archaeology

Several attempts have been made to merge Landsat TM multispectral data with high spatial resolution panchromatic SPOT images. In this work a multiresolution approach based on a generalized Laplacian pyramid with p:q (i.e., rational) scale factor is proposed to merge image data of any resolution and represent them at any scale. The resulting bands capture multispectral characteristics with an enhanced spatial resolution, thereby expediting visual analysis and contextual interpretation of the environment according to archaeological issues. Objective and subjective evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.