Processing

Pansharpening

Fuses high-resolution panchromatic with lower-resolution multispectral to produce sharper colour imagery.

MULTISPECTRAL1.20 m · R/G/B/NIR+PANCHROMATIC30 cm · single broadbandFUSEPANSHARPENED30 cm · R/G/B/NIR
Fig. 1 Pansharpening fuses a high-resolution panchromatic band with lower-resolution multispectral bands to produce imagery with the sharpness of the panchromatic and the spectral information of the colour bands. Shown: 4× resolution ratio typical of Vantor and Beijing-3 sensors.

Most high-resolution satellites capture a panchromatic (black and white) band at the highest spatial resolution alongside multispectral colour bands at typically 4× lower resolution. Pansharpening fuses them to produce imagery that has the sharpness of the panchromatic and the spectral information of the multispectral.

Bad pansharpening hurts

Bad pansharpening introduces colour artefacts, blurs edges, or distorts spectral ratios in ways that break downstream analytics. NDVI computed on poorly-pansharpened imagery is unreliable. Good pansharpening is craft. Geopera typically uses the Gram-Schmidt method, which preserves spectral fidelity for index computation while delivering the sharpness of the panchromatic band.