Assessing the effectiveness of PlanetScope synthesized panchromatic bands for spatial enhancement of Sentinel-2 data

Abstract

Following the objectives of the mission, Sentinel-2 (S2) makes a significant contribution to land monitoring, climate change, emergency management and security, and related problems. To increase the spatial resolution, researchers have been challenged to obtain a synthesized panchromatic band with a fine resolution for all S2 bands. The capacity to collect satellite imagery with a short revisit time at different spatial resolutions increases the ability for more accurate data fusion applications. Our work presents an investigation of different synthesized panchromatic bands for producing high-resolution S2 data. We produced a synthesized environment from PlanetScope (PS) data to evaluate the performance of different panchromatic bands for the enhancement of S2 10- and 20-m bands. For this, imagery over three different study areas with different characteristics was chosen: Pakistan, North Macedonia, and Turkey. After the three different synthesized panchromatic bands were produced, we fused the panchromatic bands with the 10- and 20-m S2 bands with three different state-of-the-art pansharpening techniques. Experimental comparison between the three newly produced panchromatic bands indicates that all synthesized bands can enhance the spatial resolution of the original multispectral bands. Since the difference in spatial resolution may be critical for more detailed image classification, for future studies, we recommend investigation of the fused data for different land cover applications.