MULTISPECTRAL AND PANCHROMATIC REGISTRATION OF ALSAT-2 IMAGES USING DENSE VECTOR MATCHING FOR PAN-SHARPENING PROCESS

Abstract. The pan-sharpening is a widely used operation in remote sensing image processing, this operation aims at combining an observable high spatial resolution panchromatic image with a multispectral one, to generate an unobservable image with the high spatial resolution of the former and a high spectral resolution of the latter. Generally, papers dealing with this problem omit the geometric part and suppose that these images are perfectly aligned, which is not necessarily the case for the raw imagery, where even the different bands in the multispectral imagery are misaligned. In this paper, new method for multispectral and panchromatic image registration is proposed to deal with the misalignment problem that reduces the pansharpening quality. This method called Dense Vector Matching (DVM) is based on the matching of a whole line-vector or column-vector from a reference band with the corresponding vector in a target band. DVM is applied on real data and has given acceptable results, where the QNR index of the pan-sharpening is better for images after band registration, also the registration error is reduced to sub-pixel using the proposed approach.