FUSION OF HYPERSPECTRAL AND PANCHROMATIC DATA BY SPECTRAL UNMIXING IN THE REFLECTIVE DOMAIN

Abstract. Earth observation at the local scale implies working on images with both high spatial and spectral resolutions. As the latter cannot be simultaneously provided by current sensors, hyperspectral pansharpening methods combine images jointly acquired by two different sensors, a panchromatic one providing high spatial resolution, and a hyperspectral one providing high spectral resolution, to generate an image with both high spatial and spectral resolutions. The main limitation in the fusion process is in presence of mixed pixels, which particularly affect urban scenes, and where large fusion errors may occur. Recently, the Spatially Organized Spectral Unmixing (SOSU) method was developed to overcome this limitation, delivering good results on agricultural and peri-urban landscapes, which contain a limited number of mixed pixels. This article presents a new version of SOSU, adapted to urban landscapes. It is validated on a Toulouse (France) urban dataset at a 1.6 m spatial resolution acquired by the HySpex instrument from the 2012 UMBRA campaign. A performance assessment is established, following Wald’s protocol and using complementary quality criteria. Visual and numerical (at the global and local scales) analyses of this performance are also proposed. Notably, in the VNIR domain, around 51 % of the mixed pixels are better processed by the presented version of SOSU than by the method used as a reference. This ratio is improved regarding shadowed areas in the reflective (52 %) and VNIR (57 %) domains.