Fusing Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 Satellite Images Using a Model-Based Method

Abstract

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 (S2) constellation comprises of two satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit. The S2 sensors have three spatial resolutions: 10, 20, and 60 m. The Landsat 8 (L8) satellite has sensors that provide seasonal coverage at spatial resolutions of 15, 30, and 60 m. Many remote sensing applications require the spatial resolutions of all data to be at the highest resolution possible, i.e., 10 m for S2. To address this demand, researchers have proposed various methods that exploit the spectral and spatial correlations within multispectral data to sharpen the S2 bands to 10 m. In this study, we combined S2 and L8 data. An S2 sharpening method called Sentinel-2 Sharpening (S2Sharp) was modified to include the 30 m and 15 m spectral bands from L8 and to sharpen all bands (S2 and L8) to the highest resolution of the data, which was 10 m. The method was evaluated using both real and simulated data.