Hyper-Sharpening: A First Approach on SIM-GA Data

This paper aims at defining a new paradigm (hypersharpening) in remote sensing image fusion. In fact, due to the development of new instruments, thinking only in terms of pansharpening is reductive. Even though some expressions as hyperspectral (HS) pansharpening already exist, there is not a suitable definition when multispectral/hyperspectral data are used as source to extract spatial details. After defining the hypersharpening framework, we draw the readers' attention to its peculiar characteristics, by proposing and evaluating two hypersharpening methods. Experiments are carried out on the data produced by the updated version of SIM-GA imager, designed by Selex ES, which is composed by a panchromatic camera and two spectrometers in the VNIR and SWIR spectral ranges, respectively. Owing to the different resolution factors among panchromatic, VNIR and SWIR data sets, we can apply hypersharpening to fuse SWIR data to VNIR resolution. Comparisons of hypersharpening with "traditional" pansharpening show hypersharpening is more effective.