This presentation focuses on spatial resolution characterization for QuickBird panochromatic images in 2003 - 2004 and presents data measurements and analysis of SSC edge target deployment and edge response extraction and modeling . The results of the characterization are shown as values of the Modulation Transfer Function ( MTF ) at the Nyquist spatial frequency and as the Relative Edge Response ( RER ) components . The results show that RER is much less sensitive to accuracy of the curve fitting than the value of MTF at Nyquist frequency . Therefore , the RER / edge response slope is a more robust estimator of the digital image spatial resolution than the MTF . For the QuickBird panochromatic images , the RER is consistently equal to 0.5 for images processed with the Cubic Convolution resampling and to 0.8 for the MTF resampling .