Sub-pixel mapping of remotely sensed imagery with hybrid intra- and inter-pixel dependence

Abstract

Sub-pixel mapping of remotely sensed imagery is often performed by assuming that land cover is spatially dependent both within and between image pixels. Intra- and inter-pixel dependencies are two widely used approaches to represent different land-cover spatial dependencies at present. However, merely using intra- or inter-pixel dependence alone often fails to fully describe land-cover spatial dependence, making current sub-pixel mapping models defective. A more reasonable object for sub-pixel mapping is maximizing both intra- and inter-pixel dependencies simultaneously instead of using only one of them. In this article, the differences between intra- and inter-pixel dependencies are discussed theoretically, and a novel sub-pixel mapping model aiming to maximize hybrid intra- and inter-pixel dependence is proposed. In the proposed model, spatial dependence is formulated as a weighted sum of intra-pixel dependence and inter-pixel dependence to satisfy both intra- and inter-pixel dependencies. By application to artificial and synthetic images, the proposed model was evaluated both visually and quantitatively by comparing with three representative sub-pixel mapping algorithms: the pixel swapping algorithm, the sub-pixel/pixel attraction algorithm, and the pixel swapping initialized with sub-pixel/pixel attraction algorithm. The results showed increased accuracy of the proposed algorithm when compared with these traditional sub-pixel mapping algorithms.

Acknowledgement

This work was funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 40801186, No. 40801045), the Wuhan Youth Chenguang Project (No. 200950431218), and the Knowledge Innovation Programme of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. kzcx2-yw-141).