Enhanced Back-Projection as Postprocessing for Pansharpening

Pansharpening is the process of integrating a high spatial resolution panchromatic image with a low spatial resolution multispectral image to obtain a multispectral image with high spatial and spectral resolution. Over the last decade, several algorithms have been developed for pansharpening. In this paper, a technique, called enhanced back-projection (EBP), is introduced and applied as postprocessing on the pansharpening. The proposed EBP first enhances the spatial details of the pansharpening results by histogram matching and high-pass modulation, followed by a back-projection process, which takes into account the modulation transfer function (MTF) of the satellite sensor such that the pansharpening results obey the consistency property. The EBP is validated on four datasets acquired by different satellites and several commonly used pansharpening methods. The pansharpening results achieve substantial improvements by this postprocessing technique, which is widely applicable and requires no modification of existing pansharpening methods.