Günen, Mehmet Akif; Pérez-Delgado, María-Luisa; Beşdok, Erkan

Earth observation satellites capture panchromatic images at high spatial resolution and multispectral images at lower resolution to optimize the use of their onboard energy sources. This results in a technical necessity to synthesize high-resolution multispectral images from these data. Pansharpening techniques aim to combine the spatial detail of panchromatic images with the spectral information of multispectral images. However, due to the discrete nature of these images and their varying local statistical properties, many pansharpening methods suffer from numerical artifacts such as chromatic and spatial distortions. This paper introduces the L0-Norm-based pansharpening method (L0pan), which addressed these challenges by maximizing the number of similar pixels between the synthesized pansharpened image and the original panchromatic and multispectral images. L0pan was optimized using a population-based colony search algorithm, enabling it to effectively balance both chromatic fidelity and spatial resolution. Extensive experiments across nine different datasets and comparison with nine other pansharpening methods using ten quality metrics demonstrated that L0pan significantly outperformed its counterparts. Notably, the colony search algorithm yielded the best overall results, highlighting the algorithm’s strength in refining pansharpening accuracy. This study contributed to the advancement of pansharpening techniques, offering a method that preserved both chromatic and spatial details more effectively than existing approaches.

Pérez-Delgado, María-Luisa; Günen, Mehmet Akif

Color Quantization (CQ) is a complex and hard problem because selecting the best set of colors from many available colors and using that set to obtain a good quality image is an NP-complete problem. The use of evolutionary computation and swarm-based methods to solve search and optimization problems has increased dramatically in recent years. This article compares some of these methods in order to solve the CQ problem. The following methods were used to generate CQ images: Particle swarm optimization, Artificial bee colony, Adaptive differential evolution, Success-history based adaptive differential evolution (with and without linear population size reduction), Cuckoo search, Firefly algorithm and Shuffled-frog leaping algorithm. For the first two methods, two variants were considered. Thus, a total of ten metaheuristics were compared with four classical CQ methods (Variance-based, Median-cut, Binary splitting and Wu's methods) applying them to a set of benchmark images and considering four different palette sizes (32, 64, 128, and 256 colors). Three error measures were considered to compare the methods: the mean squared error, the mean absolute error and the peak signal-to-noise ratio. Some of the swarm-based methods analyzed include a recently proposed CQ method using ants. Although they have a slow computational speed in the experimental studies, the ant-based methods are significantly better than all other methods according to the Wilcoxon signed rank test. In general, despite their speed, classical methods underperform the other ten methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.