Fusing China GF-5 Hyperspectral Data with GF-1, GF-2 and Sentinel-2A Multispectral Data: Which Methods Should Be Used?

The China GaoFen-5 (GF-5) satellite sensor, which was launched in 2018, collects hyperspectral data with 330 spectral bands, a 30 m spatial resolution, and 60 km swath width. Its competitive advantages compared to other on-orbit or planned sensors are its number of bands, spectral resolution, and swath width. Unfortunately, its applications may be undermined by its relatively low spatial resolution. Therefore, the data fusion of GF-5 with high spatial resolution multispectral data is required to further enhance its spatial resolution while preserving its spectral fidelity. This paper conducted a comprehensive evaluation study of fusing GF-5 hyperspectral data with three typical multispectral data sources (i.e., GF-1, GF-2 and Sentinel-2A (S2A)), based on quantitative metrics, classification accuracy, and computational efficiency. Datasets on three study areas of China were utilized to design numerous experiments, and the performances of nine state-of-the-art fusion methods were compared. Experimental results show that LANARAS (this method was proposed by lanaras et al.), Adaptive Gram-Schmidt (GSA), and modulation transfer function (MTF)-generalized Laplacian pyramid (GLP) methods are more suitable for fusing GF-5 with GF-1 data, MTF-GLP and GSA methods are recommended for fusing GF-5 with GF-2 data, and GSA and smoothing filtered-based intensity modulation (SFIM) can be used to fuse GF-5 with S2A data.