Deep dual stream residual network with contextual attention for pansharpening of remote sensing images

Pansharpening enhances spatial details of high spectral resolution multispectral images using features of high spatial resolution panchromatic image. There are a number of traditional pansharpening approaches but producing an image exhibiting high spectral and spatial fidelity is still an open problem. Recently, deep learning has been used to produce promising pansharpened images; however, most of these approaches apply similar treatment to both multispectral and panchromatic images by using the same network for feature extraction. In this work, we present present a novel dual attention-based two-stream network. It starts with feature extraction using two separate networks for both images, an encoder with attention mechanism to recalibrate the extracted features. This is followed by fusion of the features forming a compact representation fed into an image reconstruction network to produce a pansharpened image. The experimental results on the Pl'eiades dataset using standard quantitative evaluation metrics and visual inspection demonstrates that the proposed approach performs better than other approaches in terms of pansharpened image quality.