The effect of pansharpening algorithms on the resulting orthoimagery

Abstract

This paper evaluates the geometric effects of pansharpening algorithms on automatically generated DSMs and thus on the resulting orthoimagery through a quantitative assessment of the accuracy on the end products. The main motivation was based on the fact that for automatically generated Digital Surface Models, an image correlation step is employed for extracting correspondences between the overlapping images. Thus their accuracy and reliability is strictly related to image quality, while pansharpening may result into lower image quality which may affect the DSM generation and the resulting orthoimage accuracy. To this direction, an iterative methodology was applied in order to combine the process described by Agrafiotis and Georgopoulos (2015) with different pansharpening algorithms and check the accuracy of orthoimagery resulting from pansharpened data. Results are thoroughly examined and statistically analysed. The overall evaluation indicated that the pansharpening process didn't affect the geometric accuracy of the resulting DSM with a 10m interval, as well as the resulting orthoimagery. Although some residuals in the orthoimages were observed, their magnitude cannot adversely affect the accuracy of the final orthoimagery.