Multi-spectral Image Panchromatic Sharpening, Outcome and Process Quality Assessment Protocol

(GEO). In general, process is easier to measure, outcome is more important. The original contribution of the present study is fourfold. First, existing procedures for quantitative quality assessment (Q 2 A) of the (sole) PAN-sharpened MS product are critically reviewed. Their conceptual and implementation drawbacks are highlighted to be overcome for quality improvement. Second, a novel (to the best of these authors' knowledge, the first) protocol for Q 2 A of MS image PAN-sharpening product and process is designed, implemented and validated by independent means. Third, within this protocol, an innovative categorization of spectral and spatial image quality indicators and metrics is presented. Fourth, according to this new taxonomy, an original third-order isotropic multi-scale gray-level co-occurrence matrix (TIMS-GLCM) calculator and a TIMS-GLCM texture feature extractor are proposed to replace popular second-order GLCMs.