Assessment of the Usefulness of Spectral Bands for the Next Generation of Sentinel-2 Satellites by Reconstruction of Missing Bands

Abstract

The Sentinel-2 constellation has been providing high spatial, spectral and temporal resolution optical imagery of the continental surfaces since 2015. The spatial and temporal resolution improvements that Sentinel-2 brings with respect to previous systems have been demonstrated in both the literature and operational applications. On the other hand, the spectral capabilities of Sentinel-2 appear to have been exploited to a limited extent only. At the moment of definition of the new generation of Sentinel-2 satellites, an assessment of the usefulness of the current available spectral bands seems appropriate. In this work, we investigate the unique information contained by each 20 m resolution Sentinel-2 band. A statistical quantitative approach is adopted in order to yield conclusions that are application agnostic: multivariate regression is used to reconstruct some bands, using the others as predictors. We conclude that, for most observed surfaces, it is possible to reconstruct the reflectances of most red edge or NIR bands from the rest of the observed bands with an accuracy within the radiometric requirements of Sentinel-2. Removing two of those bands could be possible at the cost of slightly higher reconstruction errors. We also identify mission scenarios for which several of the current Sentinel-2 bands could be removed for the next generation of sensors.