Abstract
Sub-pixel mapping technology can analyze mixed pixels and realize the transformation from fractional images to fine a land-cover mapping image at the sub-pixel level. However, the spectral information used by the traditional sub-pixel mapping methods is usually constructed in a specified rectangular local window, and the spectral information of all bands is rarely used, affecting the performance of sub-pixel mapping. To solve this issue, sub-pixel mapping based on spectral information of irregular scale areas (SIISA) for hyperspectral images is proposed in this paper. The experimental results on three remote sensing images show the proposed SIISA outperforms the existing sub-pixel mapping methods.
Due to its rich spectral information from hundreds of bands, hyperspectral images not only have been actively investigated by remote sensing scholars in recent years, but also widely utilized in many fields, such as burned-area mapping, flood inundation mapping, and forest cover monito
According to the method of obtaining the sub-pixel mapping results, there are two main types, the initialization-then-optimization sub-pixel mapping and soft-then-hard sub-pixel mapping. In the initialization-then-optimization sub-pixel mapping, class labels are allocated randomly to sub-pixels, and the location of each sub-pixel is optimized to obtain the final resul
Most soft-then-hard sub-pixel mapping methods are based on the spatial dependence assumption, namely, the closer the spatial distance is, the more likely the sub-pixels belong to the same land-cover clas

Fig. 1 Spatial information in (a) the rectangular local window and (b) the irregular scale areas
图1 空间信息(a)矩形局部窗口和(b)不规则尺度区域
To solve this issue, sub-pixel mapping based on spectral information of irregular scale areas (SIISA) for hyperspectral images is proposed in this paper. The contributions of this work are as follows:
(1) Through establishing the normalized model, the proposed SIISA considers the spectral information of irregular scale areas and utilizes the spectral information of all bands, improving the accuracy of mapping results.
(2) The proposed SIISA combines the spectral information of irregular scale areas with the spatial information of irregular scale areas generated from our previous wor
(3) The superiority of SIISA over the existing sub-pixel mapping methods is demonstrated by testing three remote sensing images.
This paper is organized as follows. Section I introduces the proposed method in detail. Section II shows the experimental analysis. Section III gives the conclusions.
The overall process of SIISA is shown in

Fig. 2 The flowchart of SIISA
图2 SIISA流程图
Suppose the coarse original hyperspectral image is . The upsampled image is obtained by bicubic interpolation. The abundance image from the upsampled image is (=1, 2, . . . , , is the number of land-cover classes) with the proportional value of sub-pixel (=1, 2, . . . , , is the number of mixed pixels, is the number of sub-pixels) belonging to the land-cover class. At the same time, the segmentation result from the upsampled image is with the irregular scale areas (=1, 2, . . . ,, is the number of irregular scale areas) by a segmentation scale parameter , where contains sub-pixels. We integrate the abundance image of each class with the principal component of segmentation images to obtain the proportional values of sub-pixels in irregular scale areas. Therefore, the proportion value of the irregular scale areas belonging to the land-cover class is obtained by averaging these proportion values of sub-pixels in this area, as shown in
. | (1) |
Next, we will introduce in detail the two modules included in the proposed SIISA method, namely the spatial information module and the spectral information module.
In spatial information module, we calculate the proportion value of the irregular scale areas to obtain the spatial information of irregular scale areas by using the random walk algorith
, | (2) |
where is the column vector and is the empirical weight parameter, which is set to 0.5 here. represents the internal spatial information of each irregular scale area, and represents the spatial information between adjacent irregular scale areas. They can be calculated by Eqs. (
, | (3) |
, | (4) |
where is a diagonal matrix, where the value on the diagonal is the proportional value of each irregular scale area belonging to the land-cover class, and the value on the diagonal in is the proportional value of each irregular scale area belonging to the land-cover class. The representation of is a vector whose elements are 1. is a Laplace matrix which represents the difference between adjacent areas, as shown in
, | (5) |
where is the spectral value difference between the irregular scale area and the irregular scale area .
In spectral information module, the spectral information of all bands in the irregular scale areas is obtained by using the previously obtained segmentation image . The segmentation image contains irregular scale regions , and each includes sub-pixels. Assuming that the spectrum of sub-pixels in each irregular scale area follows an approximate normal distributio
, | (6) |
where is the number of spectral bands, and and is the average value and standard deviation of the spectral reflectance of the irregular scale area in the band . They are obtained by calculating the spectral reflectance of all sub-pixels in this irregular scale area. represents the spectral reflectance of the sub-pixel in the band in the irregular scale area .
The spatial information and spectral information are then integrated through the weight parameter to obtain the irregular scale spatial- spectral information , as shown in
. | (7) |
Finally, the class allocation based on particle swarm optimizatio
Three datasets are tested to evaluate the performance of the proposed SIISA. According to the general experimental process of sub-pixel mapping, the original fine hyperspectral image is downsampled by an mean filter to obtain the simulated coarse image as inpu
In the experiment 1, the performance of the proposed method is tested in the dataset from the multispectral sensor. The tested dataset is acquired over Rome, Italy from Landsat 8. As shown in

Fig. 3 Multispectral images covering Rome, Italy, (a) RGB of multispectral image, (b) coarse image (S=8)
图3 覆盖意大利罗马的多光谱图像,(a) 多光谱图像的RGB,(b) 粗糙图像(S=6)

Fig. 4 Hyperspectral images covering University of Pavia, Italy, (a) RGB of hyperspectral image, (b) coarse image ()
图4 覆盖意大利帕维亚大学的高光谱图像,(a) 高光谱图像的RGB,(b) 粗糙图像(S=8)

Fig. 5 Hyperspectral images covering Xiong'an New Area, China, (a) RGB of hyperspectral image, (b) coarse image ()
图5 覆盖中国雄安新区的高光谱图像,(a) 高光谱图像的RGB,(b) 粗糙图像(S=10)
The proposed SIISA was compared with four sub-pixel mapping methods including spatial-spectral interpolation (SSI
The results of experiment 1 are shown in

Fig. 6 Mapping results, (a) reference image, (b) SSI, (c) PSSD, (d) OSI, (e) RWA, (f) SIISA
图6 定位结果,(a) 参考图像,(b) SSI,(c) PSSD,(d) OSI,(e) RWA,(f) SIISA
Class | SSI | PSSD | OSI | RWA | SIISA |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vegetation (%) | 66.99 | 69.28 | 71.20 | 73.39 | 74.88 |
Building (%) | 76.06 | 74.27 | 78.26 | 80.72 | 84.31 |
Soil (%) | 61.66 | 64.45 | 67.44 | 69.64 | 71.37 |
OA (%) | 70.10 | 71.45 | 73.73 | 76.05 | 78.67 |
Kappa | 0.525 0 | 0.545 5 | 0.583 0 | 0.622 5 | 0.656 6 |
The mapping results of experiment 2 are shown in

Fig. 7 Mapping results, (a) reference image, (b) SSI, (c) PSSD, (d) OSI, (e) RWA, (f) SIISA
图7 定位结果,(a) 参考图像,(b) SSI,(c) PSSD,(d) OSI,(e) RWA,(f) SIISA
Class | SSI | PSSD | OSI | RWA | SIISA |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Shadow (%) | 49.23 | 55.56 | 57.44 | 60.29 | 61.94 |
Water (%) | 96.85 | 96.68 | 97.01 | 97.28 | 97.77 |
Road (%) | 64.99 | 62.08 | 68.64 | 70.37 | 78.39 |
Tree (%) | 75.11 | 75.96 | 78.70 | 80.25 | 84.04 |
Grass (%) | 71.00 | 74.33 | 75.49 | 78.39 | 79.87 |
Rooftop (%) | 76.32 | 78.87 | 80.59 | 83.06 | 83.62 |
OA (%) | 77.94 | 78.88 | 81.15 | 83.19 | 85.22 |
Kappa | 0.726 5 | 0.738 7 | 0.765 9 | 0.797 7 | 0.815 7 |
The mapping results of experiment 3 are presented in

Fig. 8 Mapping results, (a) reference image, (b) SSI, (c) PSSD, (d) OSI, (e) RWA, (f) SIISA
图8 定位结果,(a) 参考图像,(b) SSI,(c) PSSD,(d) OSI,(e) RWA,(f) SIISA

Fig. 9 Salient region, (a) reference image, (b) SSI, (c) PSSD, (d) OSI, (e) RWA, and (f) SIISA
图9 显著区域,(a) 参考图像,(b) SSI,(c) PSSD,(d) OSI,(e) RWA,(f) SIISA

Fig. 10 Values of (a) OA (%) and (b) Kappa obtained using the five different sub-pixel methods under different values of S
图10 在不同的S值下,使用五种不同的亚像元方法获得的(a) OA (%) 和 (b) Kappa值
As shown in

Fig. 11 OA (%) value of the SIISA in relation to weight parameter in (a) experiments 2 and (b) 3
图11 (a) 实验2和(b) 3中SIISA相对于权重参数β的OA (%)值
In addition, the segmentation is an important step to obtain the irregular scale areas in the proposed SIISA. The segmentation scale parameter mainly decides the quality of the irregular scale areas. Hence, the optimal selection of the segmentation scale parameter is necessary to analyze. Ten segmentation scale parameters (from 5 to 50 with an interval of 5) are applied to experiments 2 () and 3 ().

Fig. 12 OA (%) value of the SIISA in relation to segmentation scale parameter V in (a) experiments 2 and (b) 3
图12 (a) 实验2和(b) 3中SIISA相对于分割尺度参数V的OA (%)值
In this paper, we propose the SIISA method which establishes a normalized model to extract the spectral information of the irregular scale areas and utilizes the spectral information of all bands, improving the sub-pixel mapping result. The experimental results on three remote sensing images show that the proposed method has the better performance than the existing sub-pixel mapping methods. In terms of visual comparison, the land-cover class mapping results obtained by the proposed SIISA method have more continuous regions and smoother boundary. In terms of quantitative comparison, for Rome dataset, the accuracy of Road, Tree, and Grass in the proposed SIISA achieves the highest values, achieving 74.88%, 84.31% and 71.37%, respectively. For University of Pavia dataset, the proposed SIISA method produces the highest OA (%) and Kappa, achieving 85.22% and 0.8157. For Xiong'an New Area dataset, the proposed SIISA method can still obtain the best evaluation indices under the three scales.
Because the main contributions of this paper are to propose more accurate spectral information of the irregular scale areas, from the perspective of the universality of the algorithm, this useful spectral information can also be applied to improve other remote sensing image processing technologies, such as remote sensing image classification, target recognition and change detection. In addition, experiments with different types of sensors also prove that the proposed method is generally applicable to a variety of types of multispectral images and hyperspectral images. The appropriate parameter is selected by multiple tests in this paper. Therefore, an adaptive method for selecting is worth studying in future work.
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