Pansharpening generates the high-resolution multi-spectral (MS) image by integrating spatial details from a texture-rich panchromatic (PAN) image and spectral attributes from a low-resolution MS image. Existing methods are predominantly satellite-specific and scene-dependent, which severely limits their generalization across heterogeneous sensors and varied scenes, thereby reducing their real-world practicality. To address these challenges, we present UniPS, a universal pansharpening model for satellite-agnostic and scene-robust fusion. Specifically, we introduce a modality-interleaved transformer that learns band-wise modal specializations to form reversible spectral affine bases, mapping arbitrary-band MS into a unified latent space via tensor multiplication. Building upon this, we construct a latent diffusion bridge model to progressively evolve latent representations, and incorporate bridge posterior sampling to couple latent diffusion with pixel-space observations, enabling stable and controllable fusion. Furthermore, we devise infinite-dimensional pixel-to-latent interaction mechanisms to comprehensively capture the cross-domain dependencies between PAN observations and MS representations, thereby facilitating complementary information fusion. In addition, to support large-scale training and evaluation, we construct a comprehensive pansharpening benchmark, termed PSBench, consisting of worldwide MS and PAN image pairs from multiple satellites across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments verify that UniPS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting superior generalization and robustness across a wide range of tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Pansharpening performance comparisons on PSBench across representative spectral band configurations (4-, 7-, 8-, and 10-band). The upper and lower panels show the reduced- and full-scale evaluations using PSNR and the non-reference QNR metric, respectively. UniPS consistently outperforms the advanced task-specific models, offering a universal solution for pansharpening tasks.
Figure 2: Mainstream pansharpening paradigms: (a) Satellite-specific methods employ independent encoder-decoder architectures per spectral configuration, resulting in parameter redundancy and poor cross-satellite scalability. (b) Band-truncated methods unify data format by selecting a fixed band subset, enabling joint training but discarding spectral information and losing the ability to process excluded bands. (c) Our universal method performs band-agnostic fusion by projecting arbitrary-band MS images into a shared latent space, achieving unified modeling without band truncation or parameter duplication, while preserving full cross-band and cross-modal information.
Figure 3: Satellite observation locations and distribution of PSBench. It contains four representative spectral configurations for pansharpening tasks with over seventeen landcover categories.
Table 1: Details of the collected multi-spectral and panchromatic image pairs from different satellites.
Figure 4: The overall framework of our method. Multiple satellite observations with arbitrary spectral bands are first unified into a latent space through the modality-interleaved transformer. A latent diffusion bridge model is established for progressive latent refinement through a sequence of iterative updates, whose backbone is a tailored Infinite U-Net empowered by an infinite-dimensional interaction mechanism. This design seamlessly injects complementary spatial cues extracted from PAN images into the latent representations. These enhanced latent representations are projected back to the image domain to reconstruct the high-resolution MS images with flexible spectral dimensions.
Figure 5: The network architecture of Infinite-UNet in latent diffusion bridge model.
Figure 6: Visual comparisons of reduced scale on 4-band PSBench.
Figure 7: Visual comparisons of reduced scale on 8-band PSBench.
4 Bands
7 Bands
8 Bands
10 Bands
Average
Method
Year
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
Traditional Method
SFIM Liu (2000)
2000
26.901
0.796
19.712
5.697
29.643
0.899
8.327
2.227
26.770
0.793
35.380
6.176
33.330
0.958
4.220
2.756
29.475
0.867
14.917
4.186
IHS Tu et al. (2001)
2001
22.947
0.712
10.916
7.715
24.400
0.857
4.166
3.026
25.835
0.708
11.245
8.607
33.422
0.955
3.199
2.450
27.060
0.817
7.234
5.286
AWLP Otazu et al. (2005)
2005
28.919
0.799
6.916
6.998
28.923
0.744
2.586
2.160
24.520
0.782
10.888
10.929
34.180
0.867
2.509
1.960
29.994
0.809
5.286
5.065
MTF_GLP Aiazzi et al. (2006)
2006
24.682
0.771
16.405
6.401
20.445
0.866
4.878
1.842
26.609
0.772
10.462
6.104
32.696
0.955
3.091
1.237
26.833
0.848
9.115
3.854
Table 2: Quantitative comparisons on reduced scale over the PSBench. The best and second best results are shown in bold and underline respectively. The up or down arrows indicate higher or lower values correspond to better results.
Figure 8: Visual comparisons of full scale on 4-band PSBench.
Figure 9: Visual comparisons of full scale on 8-band PSBench.
4 Bands
7 Bands
8 Bands
10 Bands
Average
Method
Year
QNR ↑
Dλ↓
Ds↓
QNR ↑
Dλ↓
Ds↓
QNR ↑
Dλ↓
Ds↓
QNR ↑
Dλ↓
Ds↓
QNR ↑
Dλ↓
Ds↓
Traditional Method
SFIM Liu (2000)
2000
0.7849
0.0919
0.1372
0.8115
0.0768
0.1227
0.8437
0.0719
0.0918
0.8158
0.0580
0.1343
0.8084
0.0752
0.1270
IHS Tu et al. (2001)
2001
0.5925
0.1055
0.3393
0.6957
0.1360
0.2002
0.8112
0.0875
0.1128
0.7444
0.1408
0.1356
0.6928
0.1198
0.2145
AWLP Otazu et al. (2005)
2005
0.7733
0.0839
0.1619
0.8032
0.0984
0.1112
0.8533
0.0486
0.1042
0.7354
0.1550
0.1305
0.7780
0.1046
0.1341
MTF_GLP Aiazzi et al. (2006)
2006
0.7054
0.1175
0.2051
0.8200
0.0880
0.1035
0.8064
0.0855
0.1196
0.7725
0.0520
0.1857
0.7627
0.0861
0.1680
Table 3: Quantitative comparisons on full scale over the PSBench. The best and second best results are shown in bold and underline respectively. The up or down arrows indicate higher or lower values correspond to better results.
Figure 10: Distribution of data and parameters by t-SNE visualization. (a) Expert parameters and their activation frequency. Larger circles represent higher activation frequencies. (b) MS images on the reduced scale. (c) MS latents generated by MiT on the reduced scale. (d) MS images on the full scale. (e) MS latents generated by MiT on the full scale.
NFEs
4 Bands
7 Bands
8 Bands
10 Bands
Average
PSNR ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
1
33.232
6.219
3.220
0.9240
37.949
1.144
1.195
0.9262
28.610
11.338
4.880
0.8906
45.127
0.849
0.973
0.9042
37.290
4.306
2.366
0.9130
3
34.991
4.839
2.845
0.9434
39.698
0.939
1.004
0.9217
30.736
7.981
4.362
0.9197
46.759
0.700
0.852
0.8934
39.035
3.257
2.090
0.9197
5
36.795
3.872
2.708
0.9392
40.973
0.825
0.912
0.9097
33.196
6.057
4.255
0.9167
47.869
0.616
0.822
0.8760
40.634
2.582
1.996
0.9100
10
37.370
3.637
2.826
0.9327
41.307
0.804
0.904
0.9009
34.063
5.531
4.402
0.9135
47.614
0.640
0.887
0.8679
40.937
2.427
2.079
0.9030
20
37.047
3.782
3.003
0.9294
41.126
0.825
0.927
0.8992
33.807
5.658
4.577
0.9134
47.216
0.671
0.932
0.8664
40.625
2.510
2.185
0.9010
Table 4: Pansharpening performance of reduced scale with different sampling steps.
Configurations
4 Bands
7 Bands
8 Bands
10 Bands
Average
MiT
Kexp
Kgeo
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
I
✓
✓
✓
37.370
0.929
3.636
2.825
41.307
0.972
0.804
0.904
34.063
0.913
5.531
4.402
47.614
0.991
0.640
0.887
40.937
0.955
2.427
2.079
II
✕
✓
✓
33.497
0.857
5.482
3.937
37.909
0.953
1.141
1.329
29.067
0.778
8.615
5.171
42.349
0.982
1.198
1.494
36.529
0.903
3.767
2.854
III
✓
✓
✕
35.919
0.917
4.205
3.253
38.119
0.957
1.125
1.246
32.382
0.891
7.924
5.680
43.731
0.984
1.021
1.452
38.346
0.942
3.158
2.660
IV
✓
✕
✓
36.255
0.920
4.541
3.066
39.199
0.959
1.090
1.108
32.785
0.898
8.125
5.099
44.793
0.987
0.881
1.139
39.063
0.946
3.252
2.383
V
✓
Add.
33.776
0.865
5.645
3.382
37.698
0.953
1.220
1.251
29.360
0.803
9.375
5.099
44.324
0.983
1.125
1.332
37.278
0.910
3.925
2.584
Table 6: Fusion performance of UniPS variants at reduced scale.
Figure 11: Feature interaction blocks of UniPS variants.
Figure 12: Visual comparisons of reduced scale on SegGF.
Method
QuickBird Ma et al. (2020)
SegGF Wang and Ma (2025)
Jiling Cao et al. (2026)
skysat Cao et al. (2026)
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
QNR ↑
PNN Masi et al. (2016)
24.9903
0.8396
7.5687
11.6871
0.4390
24.1732
0.6991
3.9805
5.0416
0.3723
24.8081
0.8318
6.2130
5.2326
0.8231
26.0699
0.8495
6.4022
5.3754
0.8319
PanNet Yang et al. (2017)
21.6332
0.7963
12.6515
14.6404
0.4285
20.8404
0.5865
6.1647
10.2467
0.5113
22.8129
0.7539
7.9233
10.1700
0.7261
24.0236
0.7826
7.8340
10.1602
0.7052
GPPNN Xu et al. (2021)
26.3027
0.8616
6.9445
11.7491
0.7272
24.0514
0.6990
4.2215
5.6822
0.6025
25.2377
0.7580
4.9689
4.7102
0.7855
26.9535
0.7947
4.7313
4.8363
0.7915
U2Net Peng et al. (2023)
27.4097
0.7240
5.5303
8.7204
0.7961
22.4246
0.7077
5.7532
6.6718
0.8453
26.6666
0.8405
4.8783
5.2118
0.7506
27.6754
0.8642
4.7137
5.7169
0.7776
PanFlowNet Yang et al. (2023)
21.4585
0.7554
17.6751
13.2153
0.6191
12.7717
0.4703
30.0502
14.0260
0.3733
26.3085
0.7826
4.6496
3.5070
0.7918
28.7214
0.8209
4.2169
3.2943
0.8109
Table 9: Zero-shot pansharpening performance on unseen scenes and satellite datasets.
4 Bands
Truncated 7 Bands
Truncated 8 Bands
Truncated 10 Bands
Average
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
∗ PNN Masi et al. (2016)
31.547
0.861
10.794
5.986
26.731
0.893
4.745
4.767
30.510
0.837
12.725
6.909
34.104
0.955
3.790
3.736
31.364
0.894
7.703
5.168
∗ PanNet Yang et al. (2017)
32.325
0.875
6.368
7.615
30.029
0.933
2.837
5.576
31.058
0.869
7.385
8.240
37.797
0.972
2.022
4.157
33.513
0.916
4.463
6.211
∗ GPPNN Xu et al. (2021)
32.943
0.878
5.101
5.212
31.818
0.937
2.014
3.872
31.857
0.883
6.404
5.872
38.459
0.970
1.527
3.077
34.388
0.920
3.570
4.370
∗ U2Net Peng et al. (2023)
33.081
0.849
6.156
4.608
33.197
0.923
1.881
3.338
29.632
0.785
8.527
5.632
41.810
0.970
1.253
1.940
35.451
0.892
4.138
3.659
∗ PanFlowNet Yang et al. (2023)
34.306
0.886
5.526
4.696
36.174
0.945
1.310
1.698
31.952
0.867
6.914
6.316
41.120
0.971
1.396
2.169
36.523
0.922
3.626
3.573
Table 10: Quantitative comparisons on reduced scale over the truncated 4-band PSBench. All of deep methods are retrained on the mixed truncated datasets, denoted by ∗ .
Mask
4 Bands
7 Bands
8 Bands
10 Bands
Average
Ratio
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
ERGAS ↓
SAM ↓
0%
37.370
0.929
3.636
2.825
41.307
0.972
0.804
0.904
34.063
0.913
5.531
4.402
47.614
0.991
0.640
0.887
40.937
0.955
2.427
2.079
10%
36.918
0.927
3.661
2.998
39.174
0.960
1.078
1.181
33.665
0.910
5.760
4.768
45.527
0.986
0.873
1.156
39.657
0.950
2.594
2.330
20%
35.874
0.919
4.453
3.795
36.002
0.950
2.204
2.182
32.889
0.902
6.982
5.719
43.049
0.982
1.465
1.907
37.802
0.943
3.444
3.171
40%
33.879
0.895
8.601
5.797
29.589
0.911
27.523
6.199
30.716
0.862
18.928
8.953
36.674
0.965
4.370
4.961
33.543
0.915
12.166
6.066
60%
31.583
0.851
22.574
8.842
22.313
0.831
165.034
14.053
27.772
0.788
58.058
14.934
28.278
0.906
15.746
13.660
28.281
0.856
51.053
12.249
Table 12: Pansharpening performance at reduced scale under different mask ratio.
Figure 14: Hyperspectral generalization results.
Figure 15: Reduced-scale segmentation comparisons on SegGF.
Figure 16: Full-scale segmentation comparisons on SegGF.
Method
Reduced-scale
Full-scale
Accuracy
IoU
Accuracy
IoU
Avg.
Land.
Build.
Road.
Vega.
Water.
Avg
Land.
build.
Road.
Vega.
water.
Avg.
Land.
Build.
Road.
Vega.
Water.
Avg.
Land.
build.
Road.
Vega.
water.
PAN
46.29
37.17
60.37
36.82
67.57
75.82
31.38
31.31
38.72
25.75
42.35
50.18
50.09
50.08
67.24
58.20
58.32
66.72
35.48
38.58
45.80
35.49
41.89
51.12
LRMS
54.84
71.18
59.27
47.72
83.13
67.76
42.52
57.76
47.60
33.16
62.05
42.35
57.15
73.46
71.90
48.77
82.28
66.46
44.83
59.05
52.94
37.38
63.97
55.64
SFIM Liu (2000)
56.42
71.97
69.05
46.11
79.23
72.16
43.14
58.54
49.63
33.35
62.09
55.23
60.06
78.78
69.00
59.32
78.57
74.68
47.59
61.17
56.28
43.19
64.20
60.70
IHS Tu et al. (2001)
56.05
72.16
67.40
42.84
79.40
74.51
42.49
57.64
49.87
31.62
61.31
54.49
57.40
76.09
74.79
54.30
80.62
58.63
45.53
59.45
55.92
40.68
64.61
52.52
Table 14: Segmentation performance on the SegGF dataset. Bold means the best average segmentation performance.
Figure 17: Remote sensing application of NDVI.
Figure 18: Remote sensing application of NDBI.
4 Bands (NDVI)
7 Bands (NDWI)
8 Bands (NDRE)
10 Bands (NDBI)
Average
Method
RMSE ↓
MAE ↓
CC ↑
RMSE ↓
MAE ↓
CC ↑
RMSE ↓
MAE ↓
CC ↑
RMSE ↓
MAE ↓
CC ↑
RMSE ↓
MAE ↓
CC ↑
SFIM Liu (2000)
0.1202
0.0719
0.7965
0.0326
0.0204
0.9094
0.0966
0.0536
0.6701
0.0254
0.0175
0.9250
0.0701
0.0422
0.8401
IHS Tu et al. (2001)
0.1114
0.0748
0.8077
0.0373
0.0252
0.8802
0.0846
0.0526
0.6965
0.0257
0.0178
0.9233
0.0662
0.0440
0.8421
AWLP Otazu et al. (2005)
0.2294
0.1227
0.6739
0.0298
0.0205
0.9136
0.2563
0.1369
0.3355
0.0221
0.0150
0.9398
0.1299
0.0713
0.7539
MTF_GLP Aiazzi et al. (2006)
0.1353
0.0808
0.7747
0.0317
0.0189
0.9223
0.1398
0.0698
0.5704
0.0217
0.0140
0.9434
0.0803
0.0463
0.8262
GS Aiazzi et al. (2007)
0.1088
0.0722
0.8077
0.0432
0.0286
0.8597
0.0835
0.0503
0.6994
0.0276
0.0193
0.9209
0.0668
0.0439
0.8381
Table 15: Quantitative evaluation of remote sensing index over four representative applications. The best results are shown in bold . The up or down arrows indicate higher or lower values correspond to better results.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure S1: 4-band visual comparisons of reduced scale on PSBench. Zoom in for the best.
Figure S3: 8-band visual comparisons of reduced scale on PSBench. Zoom in for the best.
Figure S6: 7-band visual comparisons of full scale on PSBench. Zoom in for the best.
Figure S9: Visual comparisons of reduced scale on Quickbird.
Figure S13: Visual comparisons of full scale on Jinlin.
Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multi-spectral images by fusing the spatial detail of panchromatic images with the spectral richness of low-resolution MS data. However, most existing methods are evaluated under limited, low-resolution settings, limiting their generalization to real-world, high-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we systematically investigate the data, algorithmic, and computational challenges of cross-scale pansharpening. We first introduce PanScale, the first large-scale, cross-scale pansharpening dataset, accompanied by PanScale-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating generalization across varying resolutions and scales. To realize scale generalization, we propose ScaleFormer, a novel architecture designed for multi-scale pansharpening. ScaleFormer reframes generalization across image resolutions as generalization across sequence lengths: it tokenizes images into patch sequences of the same resolution but variable length proportional to image scale. A Scale-Aware Patchify module enables training for such variations from fixed-size crops. ScaleFormer then decouples intra-patch spatial feature learning from inter-patch sequential dependency modeling, incorporating Rotary Positional Encoding to enhance extrapolation to unseen scales. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods in fusion quality and cross-scale generalization. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/caoke-963/ScaleFormer.
Ke Cao, Xuanhua He, Xueheng Li +7
HFIPS, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Science and Technology of China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +3
Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images while preserving both spectral and spatial information. Although deep learning (DL)-based pansharpening methods achieve impressive performance, they require high training cost and large datasets, and often degrade when the test distribution differs from training, limiting generalization. Recent zero-shot methods, trained on a single PAN/LRMS pair, offer strong generalization but suffer from limited fusion quality, high computational overhead, and slow convergence. To address these issues, we propose FMG-Pan, a fast and generalizable model-guided instance-wise adaptation framework for real-world pansharpening, achieving both cross-sensor generality and rapid training-inference. The framework leverages a pretrained model to guide a lightweight adaptive network through joint optimization with spectral and physical fidelity constraints. We further design a novel physical fidelity term to enhance spatial detail preservation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets under both intra- and cross-sensor settings demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. On the WorldView-3 dataset, FMG-Pan completes training and inference for a 512x512x8 image within 3 seconds on an RTX 3090 GPU, significantly faster than existing zero-shot methods, making it suitable for practical deployment.
Zhiqi Yang, Jin-Liang Xiao, Shan Yin +2
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China · National Research Council, Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (CNR-IMAA), Tito, Italy
Pansharpening aims to fuse a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image and a low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) image to produce a high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) image. Recent deep models have achieved strong performance, yet they typically rely on large-scale pretraining and often generalize poorly to unseen real-world image pairs. Prior zero-shot approaches improve real-scene generalization but require per-image optimization, hindering weight reuse, and the above methods are usually limited to a fixed scale. To address this issue, we propose G-ZAP, a generalizable zero-shot framework for arbitrary-scale pansharpening, designed to handle cross-resolution, cross-scene, and cross-sensor generalization. G-ZAP adopts a feature-based implicit neural representation (INR) fusion network as the backbone and introduces a multi-scale, semi-supervised training scheme to enable robust generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that G-ZAP achieves state-of-the-art results under PAN-scale fusion in both visual quality and quantitative metrics. Notably, G-ZAP supports weight reuse across image pairs while maintaining competitiveness with per-pair retraining, demonstrating strong potential for efficient real-world deployment.
Zhiqi Yang, Shan Yin, Jingze Liang +1
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China