Remote sensing imaging is a tool for collecting information about the Earth's surface such as soil, vegetation and water. Recent progress in electronics, telecommunications and sensor developments have resulted in the launch of many satellites in the past three decades. Different sensors in remote sensing systems capture a variety of images with differing characteristics. Image fusion has been used to integrate two or more images and provides output images with better accuracy.
This research provides a new technique for image fusion using the contourlet transform in combination with the YCbCr color space. The output images preserve both the spectral and spatial characteristics of the input images and they are better for human and machine interpretation. This technique provides solutions to some problems (\emph{i.e.}, ghosting effect, and blocking artifacts) which the traditional image fusion techniques fail to address.
The proposed technique is tested on both classical and remote sensing images. Quality metrics are used to evaluate the results of the proposed technique. The results proved significant enhancement of the quality of the output images. More fine details are successfully captured and the original chromaticity information is preserved as well. The proposed technique eliminates the blocking artifacts in the output images. Also, a new metric is presented to measure the blocking artifacts in the fused image.
The results showed that increasing the number of contourlet decomposition levels does not degrade the quality of the output image. Therefore, the output images do not lose their chromaticity information when the number of contourlet decomposition levels increases. The proposed technique is tested on a variety of the remote sensing images that have large resolution ratios (\emph{i.e.}, 1:8, 1:16 and 1:32).
The proposed technique is robust and suitable for many image applications. The detection of the concealed objects is an example of such applications, where the proposed technique is tested to measure its capability to fuse images with different features. The results of the Contourlet-YCbCr fusion technique are compared with the conventional fusion methods, where the proposed technique is more capable in detecting the hidden objects and preserving the original color components of the input image.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OGU.10214/3294 |
| Date | 27 January 2012 |
| Creators | Ibrahim, Soad |
| Contributors | Wirth, Michael |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/ |
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