Automatic Fine Alignment of Multispectral and Panchromatic Images

In this paper, we propose a totally unsupervised procedure to cope with the residual local misalignment between a higher-resolution panchromatic (Pan) image and a series of lower-resolution multispectral (MS) bands, preliminarily interpolated to the pixel size of Pan. The proposed method exploits the different resolutions of the MS and Pan datasets to force the former to match a lowpass version of the latter. Specifically, the space-varying residue of the multivariate regression between resampled MS bands and lowpass-filtered Pan image, which locally measures the extent of MS-to-Pan misalignment, is injected into each the MS bands, after being weighted by the pixel-varying multiplicative injection gain of each band. Tests on a GeoEye-1 image, with space-varying shifts, highlight improvements in the spatial alignment.