Effects of Pansharpening on Vegetation Indices

This study evaluated the effects of image pansharpening on Vegetation Indices (VIs), and found that pansharpening was able to downscale single-date and multi-temporal Landsat 8 VI data without introducing significant distortions in VI values. Four fast pansharpening methods—Fast Intensity-Hue-Saturation (FIHS), Brovey Transform (BT), Additive Wavelet Transform (AWT), and Smoothing Filter-based Intensity Modulation (SFIM)—and two VIs—Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Simple Ratio (SR)—were tested. The NDVI and SR formulas were both found to cause some spatial information loss in the pansharpened multispectral (MS) bands, and this spatial information loss from VI transformations was not specific to Landsat 8 imagery (it will occur for any type of imagery). BT, SFIM, and other similar pansharpening methods that inject spatial information from the panchromatic (Pan) band by multiplication, lose all of the injected spatial information after the VI calculations. FIHS, AWT, and other similar pansharpening methods that inject spatial information by addition, lose some spatial information from the Pan band after VI calculations as well. Nevertheless, for all of the single- and multi-date VI images, the FIHS and AWT pansharpened images were more similar to the higher resolution reference data than the unsharpened VI images were, indicating that pansharpening was effective in downscaling the VI data. FIHS best enhanced the spectral and spatial information of the single-date and multi-date VI images, followed by AWT, and neither significantly over- or under-estimated VI values