Evaluation of Spatio-temporal Fusion Models of Multi-sensor High-resolution Satellite Images for Crop Monitoring: An Experiment on the Fusion of Sentinel-2 and RapidEye Images

초록

The objective of this study is to evaluate the applicability of representative spatio-temporal fusion models developed for the fusion of mid- and low-resolution satellite images in order to construct a set of time-series high-resolution images for crop monitoring. Particularly, the effects of the characteristics of input image pairs on the prediction performance are investigated by considering the principle of spatio-temporal fusion. An experiment on the fusion of multi-temporal Sentinel-2 and RapidEye images in agricultural fields was conducted to evaluate the prediction performance. Three representative fusion models, including Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM), SParse-representation-based SpatioTemporal reflectance Fusion Model (SPSTFM), and Flexible Spatiotemporal DAta Fusion (FSDAF), were applied to this comparative experiment. The three spatio-temporal fusion models exhibited different prediction performance in terms of prediction errors and spatial similarity. However, regardless of the model types, the correlation between coarse resolution images acquired on the pair dates and the prediction date was more significant than the difference between the pair dates and the prediction date to improve the prediction performance. In addition, using vegetation index as input for spatio-temporal fusion showed better prediction performance by alleviating error propagation problems, compared with using fused reflectance values in the calculation of vegetation index. These experimental results can be used as basic information for both the selection of optimal image pairs and input types, and the development of an advanced model in spatio-temporal fusion for crop monitoring.

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