AB-PLS-DA: Pansharpening tailored for scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry multimodal fusion

Abstract

Pansharpening constitutes a category of data fusion techniques designed to enhance the spatial resolution of multispectral (MS) images by integrating spatial details from a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. This process combines the high-spectral data of MS images with the rich spatial information of the PAN image, resulting in a pansharpened output ideal for more effective image analysis, such as object detection and environmental monitoring. Traditionally developed for satellite data, our paper introduces a novel pansharpening approach customized for the fusion of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry (EDS) data. The proposed method, grounded in Partial Least Squares regression with Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), significantly boosts the spatial resolution of EDS data while preserving spectral details. A key feature of this approach involves partitioning the PAN image into intensity bins and dynamically adapting this division in cases of overlapping compounds with similar average atomic numbers. We evaluate the method's effectiveness using in-house EDS images obtained from both even and uneven sample surfaces. Comparative analysis against existing benchmarks and state-of-the-art pansharpening techniques demonstrates superior performance in both spectral and spatial quality indicators for our method.

Keywords: Data Fusion; Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry (EDS); Pansharpening; Partial Least-Squares with Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA).