In the design of optical remote sensing sensors, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. There are tradeoffs between the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spectral resolution and spatial resolution. Therefore, optical remote sensing images are typically either provided with a high spatial resolution but with limited bands (e.g., panchromatic or RGB images), or with high spectral resolution but with lower spatial resolution (e.g., multi-/hyper-spectral images). To obtain a super image (with both high spectral and spatial resolution image), researchers have developed many methods, ranging from image superresolution (combining multiple hyperspectral images to enhance their spatial resolution) to pansharpening. Pansharpening aims at fusion of a panchromatic image with a multi-/hyper-spectral to generate a super image with the same spatial resolution of the panchromatic data and the spectral resolution of the multi-/hyper-spectral image. Many applications have been benefited from the pansharpening, such as visual interpretation in Google Earth, land-cover and land-use mapping, etc.

The goal of this contest is to boost the research on hyperspectral pansharpening. Four datasets acquired by the PRISMA mission owned and managed by the Italian Space Agency are prepared. Each dataset contains a panchromatic data and a hyperspectral image. The spatial resolution of the panchromatic image is 5 meters. Instead, the hyperspectral sensor acquires about 250 spectral bands with a spatial resolution of 30 meters. Besides, we also provide the results of some pansharpening methods as baseline results.

This contest is organized in conjunction with the 12th Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS). All participants have to submit

i) the fused products within the deadline by contacting Dr. Yang Xu (email: xuyangth90@gmail.com) indicating a group id, the affiliation, the list of members, and the indication of the point of contact with the related email address.

ii) a report with their results to the WHISPERS paper review system. A special session will be organised for accepted papers which will also be included in the WHISPERS proceedings.

Moreover, winners will get a certificate and will also be involved in the writing of an IEEE JSTARS paper summarizing the outcomes of this contest.