ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-13-2019 A CRITICAL REVIEW OF QUALITY ASSESSMENT PROTOCOLS IN PAN-SHARPENING Aghapour Maleki S. 1 Ghassemian H. 1 Image Processing and Information Analysis Laboratory, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran 18 10 2019 XLII-4/W18 13 18 Copyright: © 2019 S. Aghapour Maleki 2019 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-4-W18/13/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-13-2019.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-4-W18/13/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-13-2019.pdf

Although vast amounts of pan-sharpening methods have been proposed to date, there has been relatively little published on the topic of qualitative and quantitative assessment of the pan-sharpened multispectral (MS) data. Since a high resolution reference MS image is not available, qualitative and quantitative assessments of the spatially enhanced MS image are a much more challenging task in pan-sharpening. Thomas et al. conducted a critical survey of conventional pan-sharpening methods considering remote sensing physics. In this paper, we study the effects of physical constraints of satellite sensors on conventional quality assessment protocols. The novelty of this work is in investigating the effect of physical constraints on the performance of quality assessment protocols. The most popular protocols, which are analysed here, are quality not requiring a reference (QNR), Wald’s protocol, Zhou’s protocol, Khan’s protocol and Ghassemi’s protocol. In doing so, the strengths and weaknesses of such protocols regarding the physical limitations on satellite sensors are discussed.