A superresolution land-cover change detection method using remotely sensed images with different spatial resolutions

The development of remote sensing has enabled the acquisition of information on land-cover change at different spatial scales. However, a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions normally exists. Fine-spatial-resolution images have low temporal resolutions, whereas coarse spatial resolution images have high temporal repetition rates. A novel super-resolution change detection method (SRCD)is proposed to detect land-cover changes at both fine spatial and temporal resolutions with the use of a coarse-resolution image and a fine-resolution land-cover map acquired at different times. SRCD is an iterative method that involves endmember estimation, spectral unmixing, land-cover fraction change detection, and super-resolution land-cover mapping. Both the land-cover change/no-change map and from–to change map at fine spatial resolution can be generated by SRCD. In this study, SRCD was applied to synthetic multispectral image, Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) multispectral image and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) multispectral image. The land-cover from–to change maps are found to have the highest overall accuracy (higher than 85%) in all the three experiments. Most of the changed land-cover patches, which were larger than the coarse-resolution pixel, were correctly detected