On the Effect of Misregistration on Spatio-temporal Fusion

Abstract

It is always challenging to acquire satellite sensor data with both fine spatial and fine temporal resolution, especially for monitoring at global scales. Amongst the widely used global monitoring satellites, Landsat sensor data have a coarse temporal resolution, but fine spatial resolution, while MODIS sensor data have fine temporal resolution, but coarse spatial resolution. One solution to this problem is to blend the two types of data using spatio-temporal fusion, creating images with both fine temporal and fine spatial resolution. Reliable geometric registration of images acquired by different sensors is a prerequisite of spatiotemporal fusion. Due to the potentially large differences between the spatial resolutions of images to be fused, the geometric registration process always contains some degree of uncertainty. This paper analyzes quantitatively the influence of geometric registration error on spatio-temporal fusion. The relationship between registration error and the accuracy of fusion was investigated under the influence of different temporal distances between images, different spatial patterns within the images and using different methods.