Fast Reproducible Pansharpening Based on Instrument and Acquisition Modeling: AWLP Revisited

Pansharpening is the process of merging the spectral resolution of a multi-band remote-sensing image with the spatial resolution of a co-registered single-band panchromatic observation of the same scene. Conceived and contextualized over 30 years ago, panharpening methods have progressively become more and more sophisticated, but simultaneously they have started producing fewer and fewer reproducible results. Their recent proliferation is most likely due to the lack of standardized assessment procedures and especially to the use of non-reproducible results for benchmarking. In this paper, we focus on the reproducibility of results and propose a modified version of the popular additive wavelet luminance proportional (AWLP) method, which exhibits all the features necessary to become the ideal benchmark for pansharpening: high performance, fast algorithm, absence of any manual optimization, reproducible results for any dataset and landscape, thanks to: (i) spatial analysis filter matching the modulation transfer function (MTF) of the instrument; (ii) spectral transformation implicitly accounting for the spectral responsivity functions (SRF) of the multispectral scanner; (iii) multiplicative detail-injection model with correction of the path-radiance term introduced by the atmosphere. The revisited AWLP has been comparatively evaluated with some of the high performing methods in the literature, on three different datasets from different instruments, with both full-scale and reduced-scale assessments, and achieves the first place, on average, in the ranking of methods providing reproducible results.