A Bayesian Data Fusion Approach to Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Remotely Sensed Images

Remote sensing provides rich sources of data for the monitoring of land surface dynamics. However, single-sensor systems are constrained from providing spatially high-resolution images with high revisit frequency due to the inherent sensor design limitation. To obtain images high in both spatial and temporal resolutions, a number of image fusion algorithms, such as spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM) and enhanced STARFM (ESTARFM), have been recently developed. To capitalize on information available in a fusion process, we propose a Bayesian data fusion approach that incorporates the temporal correlation information in the image time series and casts the fusion problem as an estimation problem in which the fused image is obtained by the Maximum A Posterior (MAP) estimator. The proposed approach provides a formal framework for the fusion of remotely sensed images with a rigorous statistical basis; it imposes no requirements on the number of input image pairs; and it is suitable for heterogeneous landscapes. The approach is empirically tested with both simulated and real-life acquired Landsat and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms STARFM and ESTARFM, especially for heterogeneous landscapes. It produces surface reflectances highly correlated with those of the reference Landsat images. It gives spatio-temporal fusion of remotely sensed images a solid theoretical and empirical foundation that may be extended to solve more complicated image fusion problems