Modeling misregistration and related effects on multispectral classification

The effects of misregistration on the multispectral classification accuracy when the scene registration accuracy is relaxed from 0.3 to 0.5 pixel are investigated. Noise, class separability, spatial transient response, and field size are considered simultaneously with misregistration in their effects on accuracy. Any noise due to the scene, sensor, or to the analog/digital conversion, causes a finite fraction of the measurements to fall outside of the classification limits, even within nominally uniform fields. Misregistration causes field borders in a given band or set of bands to be closer than expected to a given pixel, causing additional pixels to be misclassified due to the mixture of materials in the pixel. Simplified first order models of the various effects are presented, and are used to estimate the performance to be expected.