Memory-augmented Deep Conditional Unfolding Network for Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to obtain high-resolution multispectral (MS) images for remote sensing systems and deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable success. However, most existing methods are designed in a black-box principle, lacking sufficient interpretability. Additionally, they ignore the different characteristics of each band of MS images and directly concatenate them with panchromatic (PAN) images, leading to severe copy artifacts [9]. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable deep neural network, namely Memory-augmented Deep Conditional Unfolding Network with two specified core designs. Firstly, considering the degradation process, it formulates the Pansharpening problem as the minimization of a variational model with denoising-based prior and non-local auto-regression prior which is capable of searching the similarities between long-range patches, benefiting the texture enhancement. A novel iteration algorithm with built-in CNNs is exploited for transparent model design. Secondly, to fully explore the potentials of different bands of MS images, the PAN image is combined with each band of MS images, selectively providing the high-frequency details and alleviating the copy artifacts. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm against other state-of-the-art methods.