In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance in the field of multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) image fusion (MS pansharpening). However, the small-scale data and the gradient vanishing problem have been preventing the existing CNN-based fusion approaches from leveraging deeper networks that potentially have better representation ability to characterize the complex nonlinear mapping relationship between the input (source) and the targeting (fused) images. In this paper, we introduce a very deep network with dense blocks and residual learning to tackle these problems. The proposed network takes advantage of dense connections in dense blocks that have connections for arbitrarily two convolution layers to facilitate gradient flow and implicit deep supervision during training. In addition, reusing feature maps can reduce the number of parameters, which is helpful for reducing overfitting that resulted from small-scale data. Residual learning is explored to reduce the difficulty for the model to generate the MS image with high spatial resolution. The proposed network is evaluated via experiments on three datasets, achieving competitive or superior performance, e.g. the spectral angle mapper (SAM) is decreased over 10% on GaoFen-2, when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
Asymmetric Non-Local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation