Fake pan-sharpening in World Wind

After reading this interesting post on Free Geography Tools, I thought I would show how easy it is to do something similar in World Wind.

I decided to use the USGS Digital Ortho layer (1m/px B&W) and mix it with the already pan-sharpened i-Cubed Landsat7 layer (15m/px colour), these image sets don’t match well at all with dates and time taken, but they can still give nice results.

First off turn on the i-Cubed layer in the Layer Manager.

Then turn on the USGS Digital Ortho Layer (don’t turn off i-cubed).

Now right click USGS Digital Ortho in Layer Manager to bring up the properties dialog, find Opacity and change it to something like 165.

An voila fake pan-sharpening that looks pretty good.

Here is another nice trick, mixing USGS Digital Ortho with USGS Topographic maps.

These features could also be useful for GIS professionals who want a quick demonstration of how their data will look pan-sharpened, without going through the lengthy/expensive processing.

Related posts:

NASA World Wind Java SDK 0.6 – Video NASA World Wind 1.4 released So what is the definition of 'free'