Co-registration accuracy between Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 orthorectified products

Abstract

Landsat orthorectified products use Ground Control Points (GCPs) and Digital Elevation Models (DEM) to improve the geolocation accuracy and temporal consistency, and to account for the relief displacements due to the sensor-target geometry. In Collection-2, to improve the geometric harmonization between Landsat and Sentinel-2 (S2) orthorectified products, the Landsat GCP's absolute and relative accuracies were improved using the S2 Global Reference Image (GRI) dataset through a continent-level bundle adjustment method. The GRI is a highly accurate global image dataset that was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to improve the S2 multi-temporal geolocation accuracy. Since late August 2021, ESA has been using the GRI dataset in the geometric refinement process to generate S2 terrain-corrected (L1C) products. This paper presents the co-registration accuracy between the Landsat-8 (L8) Collection-2 terrain-corrected products and the S2 L1C products that were processed with and without the use of the GRI dataset. The image-to-image registration (I2I) analysis performed between the L8 and S2 data products over a set of globally distributed tiles shows a significant improvement in their co-registration accuracy when GRI is used in the S2 L1C product generation. The co-registration error is estimated to be <6 m circular error at 90% probability (CE90) when GRI is used, and >12 m CE90 when GRI is not used in the S2 product generation process. A similar I2I analysis was conducted between S2 L1C products, L8 L1TP products, and L8 and Landsat 9 (L9) L1TP products. The analysis shows that the S2 L1C products are co-registered with each other temporally to better than 5.1 m CE90 when GRI is used. The L8 L1TP products and L8 versus L9 L1TP products are both co-registered temporally to better than 3 m CE90.