Commercial imaging satellites will soon be capable of economically producing 1 to 3 m resolution panchromatic images. This resolution needs to be improved to support urban planning, agribusiness, land use, forestry management, etc., where aircraft sensors customarily produce 0.15 m resolution imagery, at relatively high cost. Recent advances in image resolution enhancement and precise image navigation will be applied to limited resolution satellite image data to produce significantly finer resolution images. Software will be developed to apply these technologies as routine and efficient integrated procedures, to fill the need for timely processing of available large scientific and commercial data sets. Existing, directly applicable technology is sufficiently mature for this innovation. An a-posteriori estimation procedure, applied to repeated AVHRR images with a resolution in the range of 1 km, has achieved a five-fold improvement. The ability to reliably enhance topographical features, man-made objects, and vegetation will provide scientific and commercial users a new fertile source of detailed data.
