Improved adaptive Markov random field based super-resolution mapping for mangrove tree identification

Abstract. Traditionally, forest tree crowns are extracted using airborne or spaceborne hyper-/multi-spectral remotely sensed images or pansharpened images. However, these medium/low spatial resolution images suffer from the mixed pixel problem, and the cost to collect very high resolution image collection is high. Moreover, existing feature extraction techniques cannot extract local patterns from medium/low resolution images. Therefore, super-resolution mapping (SRM) techniques, which generate land-cover maps with finer spatial resolution than the original remotely sensed image, can be beneficial for the extraction of forest trees. The SRM methods can improve the quality of information extraction by combining spectral information and spatial context into image classification problems. In this paper we have improved an adaptive Markov random field approach for super-resolution mapping (MRF-SRM) based on spatially adaptive MRF-SPM to overcome the limitation of equal covariance matrices assumption for all classes. We applied the developed method for mangrove tree identification from multispectral image recorded by QuickBird satellite, where we generated a super-resolution map with the panchromatic image spatial resolution of 0.6 m. Moreover, the performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by employing the simulated image with different covariance matrices for each class. Our experimental results have demonstrated that the new adaptive MRF-SRM method has increased the overall accuracy by 5.1% and the termination conditions of this method were satisfied three times faster when compared to the state-of-the-art methods.