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Optical earth observation satellite sensors often provide a coarse spatial resolution (CR) multispectral (MS) image together with a fine spatial resolution (FR) panchromatic (PAN) image. Pansharpening is a technique applied to such satellite sensor images to generate an FR MS image by injecting spatial detail taken from the FR PAN image while simultaneously preserving the spectral information of MS image. Pansharpening methods are mostly applied on a per-pixel basis and use the PAN image to extract spatial detail. However, many land cover objects in FR satellite sensor images are not illustrated as independent pixels, but as many spatially aggregated pixels that contain important semantic information. In this article, an object-based pansharpening approach, termed object-based area-to-point regression kriging (OATPRK), is proposed. OATPRK aims to fuse the MS and PAN images at the object-based scale and, thus, takes advantage of both the unified spectral information within the CR MS images and the spatial detail of the FR PAN image. OATPRK is composed of three stages: image segmentation, object-based regression, and residual downscaling. Three data sets acquired from IKONOS and Worldview-2 and 11 benchmark pansharpening algorithms were used to provide a comprehensive assessment of the proposed OATPRK approach. In both the synthetic and real experiments, OATPRK produced the most superior pan-sharpened results in terms of visual and quantitative assessment. OATPRK is a new conceptual method that advances the pixel-level geostatistical pansharpening approach to the object level and provides more accurate pan-sharpened MS images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial downscaling is an ill-posed, inverse problem, and information loss (IL) inevitably exists in the predictions produced by any downscaling technique. The recently popularized area-to-point kriging (ATPK)-based downscaling approach can account for the size of support and the point spread function (PSF) of the sensor, and moreover, it has the appealing advantage of the perfect coherence property. In this article, based on the advantages of ATPK and the conceptualization of IL, an IL-guided image fusion (ILGIF) approach is proposed. ILGIF uses the fine spatial resolution images acquired in other wavelengths to predict the IL in ATPK predictions based on the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, which accounts for the spatial variation in land cover. ILGIF inherits all the advantages of ATPK, and its prediction has perfect coherence with the original coarse spatial resolution data which can be demonstrated mathematically. ILGIF was validated using two data sets and was shown in each case to predict downscaled images more accurately than the compared benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatio-temporal fusion of MODIS and Landsat data aims to produce new data that have simultaneously the Landsat spatial resolution and MODIS temporal resolution. It is an ill-posed problem involving large uncertainty, especially for reproduction of abrupt changes and heterogeneous landscapes. In this paper, we proposed to incorporate the freely available 250 m MODIS images into spatio-temporal fusion to increase prediction accuracy. The 250 m MODIS bands 1 and 2 are fused with 500 m MODIS bands 3–7 using the advanced area-to-point regression kriging approach. Based on a standard spatio-temporal fusion approach, the interim 250 m fused MODIS data are then downscaled to 30 m with the aid of the available 30 m Landsat data on temporally close days. The 250 m data can provide more information for the abrupt changes and heterogeneous landscapes than the original 500 m MODIS data, thus increasing the accuracy of spatio-temporal fusion predictions. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme was demonstrated using two datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor contains 36 bands at spatial resolutions of 250 m (e.g., bands 1–2), 500 m (e.g., bands 3–7), and 1000 m (e.g., bands 8–36). The first seven bands covering the visible to midinfrared wavelengths have been used widely for monitoring the Earth's surface. However, 500 m MODIS bands 3–7 present challenges for use in land cover/land use applications, as many land cover features on the Earth's surface possess complex structures with a spatial resolution finer than 500 m. Fusing MODIS 250 m bands 1–2 and 500 m bands 3–7 is an attractive proposition, that is, increasing the spatial resolution of bands 3–7. The geostatistical based downscaling approach, area-to-point regression kriging (ATPRK), has shown great potential for MODIS image downscaling. However, it considers the global relationship between bands 1–2 and each of bands 3–7 to select a 250 m PAN-like band from bands 1–2, which may not take full advantage of both bands 1 and 2. In this paper, a new geostatistical downscaling method of spectral–spatial adaptive ATPRK (SSAATPRK) is proposed for MODIS image downscaling. Both fine spatial resolution bands (i.e., bands 1 and 2) are used as the input to SSAATPRK, and there is no need to choose a PAN-like band for each coarse band, as in the original ATPRK method. SSAATPRK was compared to four benchmark image fusion methods, including principal component analysis, high-pass filtering, ATPRK, and adaptive ATPRK (AATPRK), using one synthetic MODIS image experiment and two real MODIS image experiments. Both visual and quantitative evaluations demonstrated that SSAATPRK produced results consistently with the greatest amount of spatial detail and the largest accuracy. Furthermore, SSAATPRK inherits completely the advantages of ATPRK and AATPRK, while extending them for MODIS image downscaling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Area-to-point regression kriging (ATPRK) is an advanced image fusion approach in remote sensing In this paper, ATPRK is considered for sharpening hyperspectral images (HSIs), based on the availability of a fine spatial resolution panchromatic or multispectral image. ATPRK can be used straightforwardly to sharpen each coarse hyperspectral band in turn. This scheme, however, is computationally expensive due to the large number of bands in HSIs, and this problem is exacerbated for multiscene or multitemporal analysis. Thus, we extend ATPRK for fast HSI sharpening with a new approach, called approximate ATPRK (AATPRK), which transforms the original HSI to a new feature space and image fusion is performed for only the first few components before back transformation. Experiments on two HSIs show that AATPRK greatly expedites ATPRK, but inherits the advantages of ATPRK, including maintaining a very similar performance in sharpening (both ATPRK and AATPRK can produce more accurate results than seven benchmark methods) and precisely conserving the spectral properties of coarse HSIs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The availability of the panchromatic (PAN) band in remote sensing images gives birth to so-called image fusion techniques for increasing the spatial resolution of images to that of the PAN band. The spatial resolution of such spatially sharpened images, such as for the MODIS and Landsat sensors, however, may not be sufficient to provide the required detailed land-cover/land-use information. This paper proposes an area-to-point regression kriging (ATPRK)-based geostatistical solution to increase the spatial resolution of remote sensing images beyond that of any input images, including the PAN band. The new approach is a two-stage approach, including covariate downscaling and ATPRK-based image fusion. The new approach treats the PAN band as the covariate and takes advantages of its textural information. It explicitly accounts for the size of support, spatial correlation, and the point spread function of the sensor and has the characteristic of perfect coherence with the original coarse data. Moreover, the new downscaling approach can be extended readily by incorporating other ancillary information. The proposed approach was examined using both Landsat and MODIS images. The results show that it can produce more accurate sharpened images than four benchmark approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]