RESTORATION TECHNIQUE FOR PLEIADES-HR PANCHROMATIC IMAGES

Abstract. 17th of December 2011 from Kourou Space Centre, French Guyana.

Like others high resolution optical satellites, it acquires both panchromatic images, with 70cm spatial resolution, and lower resolution multispectral images with 2.8m spatial resolution.

Pleiades-HR is an optimized system, which means that the Modulation Transfer Function has a low value at Nyquist frequency, in order to reduce both the telescope diameter and aliasing effects. Shannon sampling condition is thus met at first order, which also makes classical ground processing, such as image matching or resampling, more justified for a mathematical point of view.

Raw images are thus blurry which implies a deconvolution stage that restores sharpness but also increases the noise level in the high frequency domain. A denoising step, based upon wavelet packet coefficients thresholding/shrinkage technique, allows controlling the final noise level. Each of these methods includes numerous parameters that have to be assessed during the inflight commissioning period: deconvolution filter that depends on MTF assessment, instrumental noise model, noise level target for denoised images, wavelet packet decomposition level.

This paper aims to precisely describe the deconvolution/denoising algorithms and how their main parameters have been set up during the inflight commissioning stage. Special attention will be given to structured noise induced by Pleiades-HR on board wavelet-based compression algorithm