TOWARDS BETTER COASTAL MAPPING USING FUSION OF HIGH TEMPORAL SENTINEL-2 AND PLANETSCOPE-2 IMAGERIES: 12 BANDS AT 3 M THROUGH NEURAL NETWORK MODELLING

Abstract. Coastal interfaces are subject to an unprecedented rate of risks, gathering waves and rainfalls’ hazards, human assets’ densification, sea-level rise and precipitation intensification. Their sound management requires iterative observation at the highest possible spatial resolution. Sentinel-2 (S-2), provided with 13 spectral bands, datasets leverage high temporal resolution (one week) but spatial resolution (from 60 to 10 m) often remains too coarse to finely classify and monitor the coastal patches. PlanetScope-2 (PS-2) imagery benefits from very high temporal resolution (< one week) and high spatial resolution (3 m) for its blue-green-red-near-infrared dataset.

This research paper proposes to, first, downscale 12 S-2 bands (cirrus S10 being evicted) by using neural network (NN) regressions built on the 4 PS-2 bands following two methods, and second, evaluate the NN classification performance of the 12-band datasets at 3 m for mapping 8 common coastal classes on a representative site (Brittany, France). Straightforward and stepwise downscaling procedures, respectively based on 12 and 22 NN regressions, generated very good performances (R²_test=0.92 ± 0.02 and 0.95 ± 0.01, respectively). The 3-m NN classifications were considerably improved by the number of spectral bands (overall accuracy, OA, of the 4 bands: 48.12%) but also the precision of the downscaling (OA of the straightforward and stepwise downscaling: 75.25% and 93.57%, respectively). For the best classification, examination of the contribution of the individual bands revealed that S5, S7, S1, S9, S6 and S8A were meaningful (62.42, 55.02, 50.82, 46.4, 45.1, 31.02%, respectively), contrary to S12, S11 and S12 (12.47, 0 and 0%, respectively).