Multi-spectral misregistration of Sentinel-2A images: analysis and implications for potential applications

This study aims at analyzing sub-pixel misregistration between multi-spectral images acquired by the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) aboard Sentinel-2A remote sensing satellite, and exploring its potential for moving target and cloud detection. By virtue of its hardware design, MSI's detectors exhibit a parallax angle that leads to sub-pixel shifts that are corrected with special pre-processing routines. However, these routines do not correct shifts for moving and/or high altitude objects. In this letter, we apply a phase correlation approach to detect sub-pixel shifts between B2 (blue), B3 (green) and B4 (red) Sentinel-2A/MSI images. We show that shifts of more than 1.1 pixels can be observed for moving targets, such as airplanes and clouds, and can be used for cloud detection. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can detect clouds that are not identified in the built-in cloud mask provided within the Sentinel-2A Level-1C (L1C) product.