Increasing Geometric Resolution of Data Supplied by Quickbird Multispectral Sensors

On board of Quickbird satellite two types of sensors are present: panchromatic and multispectral. The first acquires earth images within spectral range 0.405 μm – 1.053 μm; the second acquires simultaneously four images of the same scene, each of them within shorter range of spectrum (Blue, Green, Red, Near-Infrared). Panchromatic images present geometric resolution 0.60 m while multispectral ones 2.40 m. For many applications, detailed data are welcome, so in the last decades several methods have been elaborated in Remote Sensing to transfer pixel dimensions of pan images into multispectral images. Included in data fusion techniques, they are named pan-sharpening methods and one of the principal problems they are called to resolve is to define weights to attribute to each multispectral component in fusion operations. The aim of this paper is to consider the application to Quickbird imagery of two efficient pan-sharpening methods, IHS and Brovey transformation, demonstrating that multispectral weights can be easily derived by analysis of sensors relative spectral radiance response. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.