Improving Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution Mapping Based on the Spatial Attraction Model by Utilizing the Pansharpening Technique

The spatial distribution information of remote sensing images can be derived by the super-resolution mapping (SRM) technique. Super-resolution mapping, based on the spatial attraction model (SRMSAM), has been an important SRM method, due to its simplicity and explicit physical meanings. However, the resolution of the original remote sensing image is coarse, and the existing SRMSAM cannot take full advantage of the spatial–spectral information from the original image. To utilize more spatial–spectral information, improving remote sensing image super-resolution mapping based on the spatial attraction model by utilizing the pansharpening technique (SRMSAM-PAN) is proposed. In SRMSAM-PAN, a novel processing path, named the pansharpening path, is added to the existing SRMSAM. The original coarse remote sensing image is first fused with the high-resolution panchromatic image from the same area by the pansharpening technique in the novel pansharpening path, and the improved image is unmixed to obtain the novel fine-fraction images. The novel fine-fraction images from the pansharpening path and the existing fine-fraction images from the existing path are then integrated to produce finer-fraction images with more spatial–spectral information. Finally, the values predicted from the finer-fraction images are utilized to allocate class labels to all subpixels, to achieve the final mapping result. Experimental results show that the proposed SRMSAM-PAN can obtain a higher mapping accuracy than the existing SRMSAM methods.