Pansharpening usually refers to the fusion of a high spatial resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with a higher spectral resolution but coarser spatial resolution multispectral (MS) image. Owing to the wide applicability of related products, the literature has been populated by many papers proposing several approaches and studies about this issue. Many solutions require a preliminary spectral matching phase wherein the PAN image is matched with the MS bands. In this paper, we propose and properly justify a new approach for performing this step, demonstrating that it yields state-of-the-art performance. The comparison with existing spectral matching procedures is performed by employing four data sets, concerning different kinds of landscapes,...