Joan Duran

Ivan Pereira-Sánchez, Eloi Sans, Julia Navarro et al.

The objective of pansharpening and hypersharpening is to accurately combine a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with a low-resolution multispectral (MS) or hyperspectral (HS) image, respectively. Unfolding fusion methods integrate the powerful representation capabilities of deep learning with the robustness of model-based approaches. These techniques involve unrolling the steps of the optimization scheme derived from the minimization of an energy into a deep learning framework, resulting in efficient and highly interpretable architectures. In this paper, we propose a model-based deep unfolded method for satellite image fusion. Our approach is based on a variational formulation that incorporates the classic observation model for MS/HS data, a high-frequency injection constraint based on the PAN image, and an arbitrary convex prior. For the unfolding stage, we introduce upsampling and downsampling layers that use geometric information encoded in the PAN image through residual networks. The backbone of our method is a multi-head attention residual network (MARNet), which replaces the proximity operator in the optimization scheme and combines multiple head attentions with residual learning to exploit image self-similarities via nonlocal operators defined in terms of patches. Additionally, we incorporate a post-processing module based on the MARNet architecture to further enhance the quality of the fused images. Experimental results on PRISMA, Quickbird, and WorldView2 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method and its ability to generalize across different sensor configurations and varying spatial and spectral resolutions. The source code will be available at https://github.com/TAMI-UIB/MARNet.

Daniel Torres, Julia Navarro, Catalina Sbert et al.

Underwater imaging plays a crucial role in ocean engineering, although captured data often suffer from poor visibility and color distortion. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based deep unfolding network for underwater image enhancement that integrates variational modeling into a learnable architecture. The framework is guided by a variational formulation based on a dehazing decomposition, incorporating a multiplicative residual component to absorb remaining artifacts and a nonlocal gradient-type constraint to preserve structural details and enhance edge sharpness. We provide a theoretical analysis establishing the existence of solution for the associated minimization problem. The proposed unfolding method incorporates Mamba layers to efficiently capture self-similarities in the scene. In addition, we introduce a proximal trajectory loss that enforces consistency between the unfolding stages and the iterations of an ideal restoration regularizer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unfolding approach achieves improved visual quality and competitive quantitative performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/MIA-UIB/Variational-Unfolding-Mamba-Underwater-Enhancement .

Antoni Buades, Joan Duran

The demosaicking provokes the spatial and color correlation of noise, which is afterwards enhanced by the imaging pipeline. The correct removal previous or simultaneously with the demosaicking process is not usually considered in the literature. We present a novel imaging chain including a denoising of the Bayer CFA and a demosaicking method for image sequences. The proposed algorithm uses a spatio-temporal patch method for the noise removal and demosaicking of the CFA. The experimentation, including real examples, illustrates the superior performance of the proposed chain, avoiding the creation of artifacts and colored spots in the final image.

Joan Duran, Antoni Buades

Pansharpening techniques aim at fusing low-resolution multispectral (MS) images and high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images to produce high-resolution MS images. Despite significant progress in the field, spectral and spatial distortions might still compromise the quality of the results. We introduce a restoration strategy to mitigate artifacts of fused products. After applying the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) transform to a pansharpened image, the chromatic components are filtered conditionally to the geometry of PAN. The structural component is then replaced by the locally histogram-matched PAN for spatial enhancement. Experimental results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed restoration chain.

Joan Duran, Antoni Buades, Bartomeu Coll et al.

Most satellites decouple the acquisition of a panchromatic image at high spatial resolution from the acquisition of a multispectral image at lower spatial resolution. Pansharpening is a fusion technique used to increase the spatial resolution of the multispectral data while simultaneously preserving its spectral information. In this paper, we consider pansharpening as an optimization problem minimizing a cost function with a nonlocal regularization term. The energy functional which is to be minimized decouples for each band, thus permitting the application to misregistered spectral components. This requirement is achieved by dropping the, commonly used, assumption that relates the spectral and panchromatic modalities by a linear transformation. Instead, a new constraint that preserves the radiometric ratio between the panchromatic and each spectral component is introduced. An exhaustive performance comparison of the proposed fusion method with several classical and state-of-the-art pansharpening techniques illustrates its superiority in preserving spatial details, reducing color distortions, and avoiding the creation of aliasing artifacts.