PlanetScope Radiometric Normalization and Sentinel-2 Super-Resolution (2.5 m): A Straightforward Spectral-Spatial Fusion of Multi-Satellite Multi-Sensor Images Using Residual Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Sentinel-2 (S2) imagery is used in many research areas and for diverse applications. Its spectral resolution and quality are high but its spatial resolutions, of at most 10 m, is not sufficient for fine scale analysis. A novel method was thus proposed to super-resolve S2 imagery to 2.5 m. For a given S2 tile, the 10 S2 bands (four at 10 m and six at 20 m) were fused with additional images acquired at higher spatial resolution by the PlanetScope (PS) constellation. The radiometric inconsistencies between PS microsatellites were normalized. Radiometric normalization and super-resolution were achieved simultaneously using state-of–the-art super-resolution residual convolutional neural networks adapted to the particularities of S2 and PS imageries (including masks of clouds and shadows). The method is described in detail, from image selection and downloading to neural network architecture, training, and prediction. The quality was thoroughly assessed visually (photointerpretation) and quantitatively, confirming that the proposed method is highly spatially and spectrally accurate. The method is also robust and can be applied to S2 images acquired worldwide at any date.