Information fusion approach for downscaling coarse resolution scatterometer data

ABSTRACT The applications of scatterometer data (σ°) are limited due to their coarser resolution (25–50 km). Some image reconstruction techniques are available to generate high-resolution products, but they require various sensor parameters and multiset observation, making them complex to use. Therefore, this paper proposes an information fusion approach to disaggregate the coarse resolution σ° product. The coarse resolution backscattering signal includes the contribution from more than one land cover class, such as short vegetation, soil, urban and tall vegetation, the information of which can be obtained from normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), vegetation temperature condition index (VTCI), and fraction cover of urban and forests, respectively. Disaggregating this coarse resolution pixel, an optimum weight information is required that provides the distribution of each class. Since the distribution of land cover classes is not homogeneous for every pixel, a variance-based fusion approach has been used to obtain the optimum weight factors to fuse NDVI, VTCI, and fraction cover. These weight factors are used to disaggregate every coarse-resolution pixel into high-resolution pixels. The developed model is applied to Sentinel-1 and Scatsat-1 level-3 products, and the obtained results are quite satisfactory.