Preliminary comparative assessment of Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 (MSI and OLIsensors) images

Free access to the Landsat dataset and Sentinel 2 images has provided a great opportunity for long-term monitoring of resources. Landsat 8 was launched in 2013 to continue the mission of the previous Earth observation satellites. Landsat 8multi-spectral sensor, Operational Land Imager (OLI), provides multi-spectral images with 30-meter resolution. Sentinel 2 was launched in 2015 with a multispectral sensor called MSI which captures images with different spatial resolutions (10m to 60m). The secret mission of Landsat satellites started in the 1970s and they have the longest archive of satellite images collected from the Earth. Sentinel 2 offers higher spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions and therefore it is important to compare the compatibility of Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 images. OLI and MSI sensors both operate in the optical region, thus weather conditions can impose some limitations on their data acquisition. In such circumstances, data collected by a compatible and similar sensor can replace the cloud-covered images.Generally, spectral features of new sensors are designed in such a way toconform to the corresponding bands of the previous sensors. The present study compares the corresponding bands of MSI and OLI sensors. The efficiency of both sensors in the classification of a heterogeneous and complex region has also been investigated.

Three near-simultaneous pairs of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 scenes were obtained to conduct a comparative study. Images were acquired in August 2017, November 2017, and July 2018.Minudasht - in northern Iran- was selected as the study area because of the presence of different land cover classes including rainfed agricultural lands, irrigated agricultural lands, forests, residential areas, and bare lands.Thescenes were processed for further analysis. First, the scenes were atmospherically corrected. In the next step, spatial resolution of MSI bands was resampled to 30 m, and each pair of mages were geometrically co-registered. To do so, 10 tie points were selected, and scenes were co-registered usingthe first-degree polynomial method. RMSE values were reported 2.5 m, 2.4 m, and 2.8 m for August 2017, November 2017, and July 2018, respectively. To investigate the similarities and differences of the sensors’ spectral content, the correlation between corresponding bands of the two sensors was estimated.Then, images were classified using the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. Five distinct land cover classes were found in the region including rainfed agricultural land, gardens and irrigated agricultural land, forests, residential areas, and bare lands. The training samples were selectedfromthe land use map and high-resolution Google Earth images. Approximately 300 training samples were selected for each land cover class. The accuracy of classification results was compared to verify the efficiency of two sensors in land cover mapping.  Independent validation samples were selected for each class. Overall accuracy, commission error, and omission error were calculatedbased on the confusion matrices.

The reported correlation coefficientfor all corresponding bands was higher than 0.8. Results indicate a high level of similarity between the two sensors. Similar findings were reported by previous studies. Overall classification accuracy ofOLIimagescollected in August 2017, November 2017, and July 2018 was 91. 35 %, 89.60 %, and 93.12%, respectively. Overall classification accuracy ofMSI images collected inAugust 2017, November 2017, and July 2018 was 94.76 %, 95.55 %, and 94.07%, respectively. As it is obvious, Sentinel 2showed a higher performance in comparison to Landsat’s, because of its higher spatial resolution. A medium spatial resolution image collected from a complex landscape is often composed of mixed pixels, since different land cover types exist in one pixel. As the image’s spatial resolution improves, the dimensions of each pixeldecrease. Therefore, the number of mixed pixels will decrease and a higher classification accuracy will be expected.

Results confirm the similarity of two sensors in land cover classification. However, the findings could not be extended to other applications. MSI sensorslacka thermal bandand thus are not applicable when such a feature is needed (for an instance inthe retrieval of land surface temperature). In such applications, MSI cannot substitute OLI. For further studies, it is necessary to compare the performance of these sensors in different regions, since different land cover types may impactclassification results. Findings of the present study may raise attention to the differences between Landsat 8- OLI and Sentinel 2 MSI. Further studies can be conducted to investigate the differences between these two sensors. The possible similarities of othersimilar sensors can also be a topic for further investigations.