 This video will introduce you to pan-sharpening techniques using ArcGIS. Pan-sharpening is an image processing technique to spatially enhance your imagery. The process is typically carried out using a slightly coarser resolution multispectral image and a higher resolution panchromatic image. The pan-sharpening process creates a new image in which it has the spatial properties, that is the resolution of the panchromatic image, but the spectral properties of the coarser resolution multispectral image. For the demonstration, I'm going to use a Landsat 7 ETM plus dataset. Each band is represented by a separate GeoTIFF file. So my first step is going to be to stack the bands that I want to pan-sharpen together using the composite bands tool. I'm going to add bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 to create a 6 band image composite. And I'm going to save the output as a GeoTIFF file. The output from the composite bands tool is a single raster in GeoTIFF format that contains all 6 bands. Now we're ready to perform the pan-sharpening. We'll go back into Arc Toolbox and launch the create pan-sharpened raster dataset tool. The first thing we need to specify is the input raster. This is the 6 band multispectral composite image we just created. Then we'll move through and confirm that the red, green, blue and infrared bands are set correctly. Next, we'll give a name to our output raster dataset. Once again, we'll save it in GeoTIFF format. Finally, we need to specify the panchromatic dataset. This is the raster that's band 8 from Landsat 7. With the settings correct, we'll accept all the other defaults and click OK to run the pan-sharpening tool. Once the pan-sharpened tool is finished running, we'll have a new 6 band multispectral image. So this raster has the number of bands from the multispectral image but the pixel size from the panchromatic image. Let's do a quick comparison between the original multispectral image and the pan-sharpened image. We see the original multispectral image has a 30 meter resolution and a size of about 325 megabytes. The pan-sharpened has a pixel size of 15 meters and a size of 1.27 gigabytes. Moving over to Arc Map, we can use our swipe tool to evaluate our inputs and outputs. First, we're swiping the multispectral image over the panchromatic image, so these were the two inputs to the panchromatic tool. Now we'll swipe the multispectral image over the panchromatic image. There are both benefits and drawbacks to the panchromatic process. On the benefit side, we have increased spatial resolution, which allows us to more easily identify and resolve narrowly configured features. On the negative side, we've altered the spectral qualities of the image somewhat, so if we were using classification techniques that are heavily reliant on spectral signatures, they could be hampered by this process. There exist a multitude of pan-sharpening algorithms, some of which perform better on certain sensors than others. When you're carrying out the pan-sharpening process, it behooves you to do some research in the peer-reviewed literature and also to play around with the pan-sharpening algorithms and the various settings to determine the optimal output.