Athens, Greece

 

Pan-Sharpening

Low-resolution false colour image made of Landsat ETM+ band 2 (as blue), band 4 (as green), and band 7 (as red).

Image Source: Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF), http://www.landcover.org/ Input Landsat images (WRS-2 path 183, row 034, acquired 05/20/2000) were processed at Level 1G.

Coastline data: National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), NOAA, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/

The overlay of imagery and coastlines can be readily done in most GIS software, such as ArcView and MapInfo (even in free viewers such as ESRI's ArcExplorer and MapInfo's Proviewer).

The red rectangle area is shown below:

Athens' harbour

Top:

Faliro Coastal Zone Olympic Complex: Low-resolution false colour image with a spatial resolution of 28.5 m (resampled by200%).
Bottom:

Pan-sharpened, high-resolution false colour composite from HighView, with a spatial resolution of 14.25 m. Note that street networks become more detailed and salient, and coastlines more smoothed.

 

Band Combination

The Landsat ETM+ true colour composite is made of Landsat ETM+ band 1(blue), band 2(green), and band 3(red) in HighView.

The two rectangle areas in red are shown below:

tourists' boats

The wavy harbour: many tourist boats heading south. In this example the advantage of Landsat imagery with a large swath is obvious and a panorama view of the sea can be seen easily (spatial resolution 28.5 m).



An island

Tourist destination in the south (spatial resolution 28.5 m).


How did we make the above maps? Here are three simple steps and no image analysis knowledge is required:

  • Step 1: Visit the website of the Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) at http://www.landcover.org/ and download publicly available Landsat ETM+ imagery of Athens;
  • Step 2: Unzip the downloaded GeoTIFF files; and
  • Step 3: Use the HighView's "Band Combination" menu and "Pan-sharpening" menu to make true colour composite and pan-sharpened imagery. Just fill in input file names and use default settings of image stretching, results in both 24-bit BMP format and native GeoTIFF format will be produced.
The free trial version of HighView available at the download page contains a free, advanced, and fully functional utility for band combinations of Landsat ETM+ images.