A method for generating high resolution satellite image time series

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for satellite remote sensing data with both high spatial and temporal resolution in many applications. But it still is a challenge to simultaneously improve spatial resolution and temporal frequency due to the technical limits of current satellite observation systems. To this end, much R&D efforts have been ongoing for years and lead to some successes roughly in two aspects, one includes super resolution, pan-sharpen etc. methods which can effectively enhance the spatial resolution and generate good visual effects, but hardly preserve spectral signatures and result in inadequate analytical value, on the other hand, time interpolation is a straight forward method to increase temporal frequency, however it increase little informative contents in fact. In this paper we presented a novel method to simulate high resolution time series data by combing low resolution time series data and a very small number of high resolution data only. Our method starts with a pair of high and low resolution data set, and then a spatial registration is done by introducing LDA model to map high and low resolution pixels correspondingly. Afterwards, temporal change information is captured through a comparison of low resolution time series data, and then projected onto the high resolution data plane and assigned to each high resolution pixel according to the predefined temporal change patterns of each type of ground objects. Finally the simulated high resolution data is generated. A preliminary experiment shows that our method can simulate a high resolution data with a reasonable accuracy. The contribution of our method is to enable timely monitoring of temporal changes through analysis of time sequence of low resolution images only, and usage of costly high resolution data can be reduces as much as possible, and it presents a highly effective way to build up an economically operational monitoring solution for agriculture, forest, land use investigation, environment and etc. applications.