Sentinel-2 Pan Sharpening—Comparative Analysis

Pan Sharpening is an important part of the Remote Sensing science. Obtaining high spatial resolution data can be crucial in some studies. Sentinel-2 provides data of 10, 20 and 60 m, and it is a promising program for Earth observation studies. Although Sentinel-2 provides a high range of multispectral bands, the lack of panchromatic band disables the production of a set of fine-resolution (10 m) bands. However, few methods have been developed for increasing the spatial resolution of the 20 m bands up to 10 m. In this study, three different methods of producing panchromatic bands have been compared. The first method uses the closest higher spatial resolution band to the lowest spatial resolution band as a panchromatic band, the second method uses one single band as the panchromatic band produced as an average value out of all fine resolution bands, while the third method uses linear correlation for the selection of the panchromatic band. The 60 m bands have not been taken into consideration in this study. In order to compare these methods, three image fusion techniques from different fusion subsections (Component substitution—Intensity Hue Saturation IHS; Numerical method—High Pass Filter HPF; Hybrid Technique—Wavelet Principal Component WPC) have been applied on two Sentinel-2 images over the same study area, on different dates. For the accuracy assessment, both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been made. It has been concluded that using the average value of the visual and the near infrared bands can be accepted as a panchromatic band in the Sentinel-2 dataset.