A spatial resolution effect analysis of remote sensing bathymetry

A spatial resolution effect of remote sensing bathymetry is an important scientific problem. The in situ measured water depth data and images of Dongdao Island are used to study the effect of water depth inversion from different spatial resolution remote sensing images. The research experiments are divided into five groups including QuickBird and WorldView-2 remote sensing images with their original spatial resolution (2.4/2.0 m) and four kinds of reducing spatial resolution (4, 8, 16 and 32 m), and the water depth control and checking points are set up to carry out remote sensing water depth inversion. The experiment results indicate that the accuracy of the water depth remote sensing inversion increases first as the spatial resolution decreases from 2.4/2.0 to 4, 8 and 16 m. And then the accuracy decreases along with the decreasing spatial resolution. When the spatial resolution of the image is 16 m, the inversion error is minimum. In this case, when the spatial resolution of the remote sensing image is 16 m, the mean relative errors (MRE) of QuickBird and WorldView-2 bathymetry are 21.2% and 13.1%, compared with the maximum error are decreased by 14.7% and 2.9% respectively; the mean absolute errors (MAE) are 2.0 and 1.4 m, compared with the maximum are decreased by 1.0 and 0.5 m respectively. The results provide an important reference for the selection of remote sensing data in the study and application of the remote sensing bathymetry.