Evaluating the sensitivity of image fusion quality metrics to image degradation in satellite imagery

Referring to the high potential of topographic satellites in collecting high resolution panchromatic imagery and high spectral, multi spectral imagery, the purpose of image fusion is to produce a new image data with high spatial and spectral characteristics. It is necessary to evaluate the quality of fused image by some quality metrics before using this product in later applications. Up to now, several metrics have been proposed for assessment of image quality; which can also be applied for quality evaluation of fused images. However, it seems more investigations are needed to inspect potential evaluation of image fusion quality metrics to registration accuracy, especially in high resolution satellite imagery. This paper focuses on such studies and, using different image fusion quality metrics, experiments conducted to evaluate the sensitivity of them on high resolution satellite imagery in an urban area. The obtained results clearly reveal that these metrics sometimes do not behave robust in the whole area and also their achieved results are inconsistence in different patch areas in comparison with the whole image.