Assessing the Sharpness of Satellite Images: Study of the PlanetScope Constellation
This work addresses the need for automatic quality assessment in satellite imagery for monitoring applications, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of uneven image quality in large volumes of satellite data from the PlanetScope constellation by developing a method to quantify sharpness through blur kernel estimation, enabling the discarding of low-quality images and deconvolution of blurry ones.
New micro-satellite constellations enable unprecedented systematic monitoring applications thanks to their wide coverage and short revisit capabilities. However, the large volumes of images that they produce have uneven qualities, creating the need for automatic quality assessment methods. In this work, we quantify the sharpness of images from the PlanetScope constellation by estimating the blur kernel from each image. Once the kernel has been estimated, it is possible to compute an absolute measure of sharpness which allows to discard low quality images and deconvolve blurry images before any further processing. The method is fully blind and automatic, and since it does not require the knowledge of any satellite specifications it can be ported to other constellations.