Contextual Subpixel Mapping of Hyperspectral Images Making Use of a High Resolution Color Image

This paper describes a hyperspectral image classification method to obtain classification maps at a finer resolution than the image's original resolution. We assume that a complementary color image of high spatial resolution is available. The proposed methodology consists of a soft classification procedure to obtain landcover fractions, followed by a subpixel mapping of these fractions. While the main contribution of this article is in fact the complete multisource framework for obtaining a subpixel map, the major novelty of this subpixel mapping approach is the inclusion of contextual information, obtained from the color image. Experiments, conducted on two hyperspectral images and one real multisource data set, show excellent results, when compared to classification of the hyperspectral data only. The advantage of the contextual approach, compared to conventional subpixel mapping approaches, is clearly demonstrated.