Super-resolution mapping of landscape objects from coarse spatial resolution imagery

The landscape patches that are fundamental to landscape ecology may be considered as objects to be extracted from remotely sensed imagery. The accuracy with which objects may be characterised varies as a function of the spatial resolution of the imagery used. In general terms, a coarsening of the spatial resolution degrades the characterization of objects, notably through an increase in the proportion of mixed pixels which cannot be appropriately represented by conventional hard classification techniques. Accurate landscape mapping may often require either the adoption of fine spatial resolution imagery or use of sub-pixel scale analyses of coarse spatial resolution imagery. As the former is often impractical, the full realization of the potential of remote sensing as a source of information on landscape objects requires developments in sub-pixel scale techniques. In this paper, a new method of superresolution mapping based on a unifying framework of image halftoning, inverse halftoning and Hopfield neural network techniques is proposed as a means of gaining accurate information on landscape patches from coarse spatial resolution images. Fine temporal resolution of coarse spatial resolution remote sensing systems is exploited by fusing the time-series data as an input for the superresolution mapping. The accuracy of the analyses is evaluated relative to conventional a hard classification technique using object characterization. The results show that the proposed hybrid method is considerably more accurate than standard hard analyses in estimating the shape of the objects. The results also demonstrate that objects that are smaller than a pixel, which are missed using the hard classification techniques, can be detected using the super-resolution mapping. * Corresponding author.