Image Quality Assessment of Pleiades-1A Triplet Bundle and Pan-sharpened Images

The image quality of Pleiades-1A panchromatic and multispectral as well as pan-sharpened images has been analyzed. The original images are available with 12 bit radiometric resolution, but for mapping purposes often this is reduced to 8 bit, corresponding to the grey value resolution of the computer screens. Therefore, original images as well as the 8 bit images were investigated. Pleiades images are distributed with 50 cm ground sampling distance (GSD) in spite of the original resolution with 70 cm GSD. For this the effective image quality was determined by edge analysis. The edge analysis can be influenced by image sharpening. An image sharpening usually enlarges the image noise, which however can be reduced by filtering. This can influence the presentation of small image details, so in addition to edge and noise analysis image details in the Pleiades images were compared with the details visible in satellite images taken by other sensors having similar ground resolution. A blur analysis did not improve the information about image quality. In the Zonguldak test site (Turkey) Pleiades images are compared with WorldView-1-, QuickBird- and IKONOS-images. The zooming from 70 cm to 50 cm GSD could not be identified by the investigation of the Pleiades image quality. It leads to an even better quality than of the WorldView-1- and QuickBird images with an originally higher resolution.