# Assessing the Sharpness of Satellite Images: Study of the PlanetScope Constellation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an automatic, blind method to assess the sharpness of satellite images from the PlanetScope constellation by estimating blur kernels, enabling quality filtering and deblurring for improved analysis.

## Contribution

It presents a novel blind sharpness estimation technique that does not rely on satellite specifications, applicable to various satellite constellations.

## Key findings

- Effective in quantifying image sharpness
- Can discard low-quality images automatically
- Enables deblurring of blurry satellite images

## Abstract

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.