221
Views
37
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

Vectorial boundary-based sub-pixel mapping method for remote-sensing imagery

, , &
Pages 1756-1768 | Received 11 Jul 2013, Accepted 01 Jan 2014, Published online: 24 Feb 2014
 

Abstract

This article presents a vectorial boundary-based sub-pixel mapping (VBSPM) method to obtain the land-cover distribution with finer spatial resolution in mixed pixels. With inheritance from the geometric SPM (GSPM), VBSPM first geometrically partitions a mixed pixel using polygons, and then utilizes a vectorial boundary extraction model (VBEM), rather than the rasterization method in GSPM, to determine the location and length of each edge in the polygon, while these edges are located at the boundary of and within the interior of the mixed pixel. Furthermore, VBSPM uses a decay function to manage the mixed pixels along the image boundary region due to the missing parts of their neighbours. Finally, a ray-crossing algorithm is employed to determine the land-cover class of each sub-pixel in terms of vectorial boundaries. The experiments with artificial and remotely sensed images have demonstrated that VBSPM can reduce the inconsistency between the boundaries of different land-cover classes, approximately calculating errors with an odd zoom factor, and achieve more accurate sub-pixel mapping results than the hard classification methods and GSPM.

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 40971222].

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.