ABSTRACT
The entire effort of remote sensing and RSIF is to provide information about Earth and its complex processes. The information only makes sense if it is accompanied by a quality parameter allowing a proper judgment of its validity. Especially, if multiple sources and processing steps are involved, this quality assessment and error propagation is of essential importance. Successful RSIF aims at providing a fused image that inherits the properties and content of its input images. In RSIF, the assessment of the achievement and improvement of the process in the final fused product in terms of quality and contribution to the application is an active research field and the question whether or not an index represents fused image quality is still open (Zhang 2008). Over the years, researchers managed to establish a series of protocols for RSIF that contribute to an objective image quality evaluation. This chapter introduces the concept of quality and explains the various options of quality assessment, including the quantitative and qualitative approach. Of particular interest is the evaluation of pansharpening quality since it forms the most popular RSIF interest. For this purpose, a generic framework for pansharpening quality assessment is presented.
