Generation of Homogeneous VHR Time Series by Nonparametric Regression of Multisensor Bitemporal Images

Abstract

The availability of multitemporal images acquired by several very high geometrical resolution (VHR) optical sensors makes it possible to build VHR image time series (TS) of images acquired over the same geographical area with a temporal resolution better than the one achievable when considering a single VHR sensor. However, such TS include images showing different characteristics from the geometrical, radiometrical, and spectral viewpoint. Thus, there is a need of methods for building homogeneous VHR optical TS when using multispectral multisensor images. By focusing on the spectral domain, we propose a method to transform a VHR image into the spectral domain of another image in the same multisensor TS but acquired by a different sensor. To this end, a prediction-based approach relying on a nonparametric regression method is employed to mitigate sensor-dependent spectral differences. The impact of possible changes occurred on the ground is mitigated by training the prediction model on unchanged samples, only. Experimental results obtained on VHR optical multisensor images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.