Quality Assessment by Region and Land Cover of Sharpening Approaches Applied to GF-2 Imagery

The existing pansharpening methods applied to recently obtained satellite data can produce spectral distortion. Therefore, quality assessments should be performed to address this. However, quality assessment of the whole image may not be sufficient, because major differences in a given region or land cover can be minimized by small differences in another region or land cover in the image. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of the pansharpening process for different regions and land covers. In this study, the widely used modified intensity-hue-saturation (mIHS), Gram–Schmidt spectral sharpening (GS), color spectral sharpening (CN), and principal component analysis (PCA) pansharpening methods were applied to Gaofen 2 (GF-2) imagery and evaluated according to region and land-cover type, which was determined via an object-oriented image analysis technique with a support vector machine-supervised method based on several reliable quality indices at the native spatial scale without reference. Both visual and quantitative analyses based on region and land cover indicated that all four approaches satisfied the demands for improving the spatial resolution of the original GF-2 multispectral (MS) image, and mIHS produced results superior to those of the GS, CN, and PC methods by preserving image colors. The results indicated differences in the pansharpening quality among different land covers. Generally, for most land-cover types, the mIHS method better preserved the spectral information and spatial autocorrelation compared with the other methods.