Hyperspectral and multispectral image fusion using cluster-based multi-branch BP neural networks

Fusion of the high-spatial-resolution hyperspectral (HHS) image using low-spatialresolution hyperspectral (LHS) and high-spatial-resolution multispectral (HMS) image is usually formulated as a spatial super-resolution problem of LHS image with the help of an HMS image, and that may result in the loss of detailed structural information. Facing the above problem, the fusion of HMS with LHS image is formulated as a nonlinear spectral mapping from an HMS to HHS image with the help of an LHS image, and a novel cluster-based fusion method using multi-branch BP neural networks (named CF-BPNNs) is proposed, to ensure a more reasonable spectral mapping for each cluster. In the training stage, considering the intrinsic characteristics that the spectra are more similar within each cluster than that between clusters and so do the corresponding spectral mapping, an unsupervised clustering is used to divide the spectra of the down-sampled HMS image (marked as LMS) into several clusters according to spectral correlation. Then, the spectrum-pairs from the clustered LMS image and the corresponding LHS image are used to train multi-branch BP neural networks (BPNNs), to establish the nonlinear spectral mapping for each cluster. In the fusion stage, a supervised clustering is used to group the spectra of HMS image into the clusters determined during the training stage, and the final HHS image is reconstructed from the clustered HMS image using the trained multi-branch BPNNs accordingly. Comparison results with the related state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a better fusion quality both in spatial and spectral domains.