A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF EFFICACY OF SUPER RESOLVED AIRBORNE HYPERSPECTRAL OUTPUTS IN URBAN MATERIAL AND LAND COVER INFORMATION EXTRACTION

Abstract. Urban areas despite being heterogeneous in nature are characterized as mixed pixels in medium to coarse resolution imagery which renders their mapping as highly inaccurate. A detailed classification of urban areas therefore needs both high spatial and spectral resolution marking the essentiality of different satellite data. Hyperspectral sensors with more than 200 contiguous bands over a narrow bandwidth of 1–10 nm can distinguish identical land use classes. However, such sensors possess low spatial resolution. As the exchange of rich spectral and spatial information is difficult at hardware level resolution enhancement techniques like super resolution (SR) hold the key. SR preserves the spectral characteristics and enables feature visualization at a higher spatial scale. Two SR algorithms: Anchored Neighbourhood Regression (ANR) and Sparse Regression and Natural Prior (SRP) have been executed on an airborne hyperspectral scene of Advanced Visible/Near Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) for the mixed environment centred on Kankaria Lake in the city of Ahmedabad thereby bringing down the spatial resolution from 8.1 m to 4.05 m. The generated super resolved outputs have been then used to map ten urban material and land cover classes identified in the study area using supervised Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification methods. Visual comparison and accuracy assessment on the basis of confusion matrix and Pearson’s Kappa coefficient revealed that SRP super-resolved output classified using radial basis function (RBF) kernel based SVM is the best outcome thereby highlighting the superiority of SR over simple scaling up and resampling approaches.