Urban Classification by the Fusion of Thermal Infrared Hyperspectral and Visible Data

The 2014 Data Fusion Contest, organized by the Image Analysis and Data Fusion (IADF) Technical Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, involved two datasets acquired at different spectral ranges and spatial resolutions: a coarser-resolution long-wave infrared (LWIR, thermal infrared) hyperspectral data set and fine-resolution data acquired in the visible (VIS) wavelength range. In this article, a novel multi-level fusion approach is proposed to fully utilize the characteristics of these two different datasets to achieve improved urban land-use and land-cover classification. Specifically, road extraction by fusing the classification result of the TI-HSI dataset and the segmentation result of the VIS dataset is first proposed. Thereafter, a novel gap inpainting method for the VIS data with the guidance of the TI-HSI data is presented to deal with the swath width inconsistency, and to facilitate an accurate spatial feature extraction step. The experimental results with the 2014 Data Fusion Contest datasets suggest that the proposed method can alleviate the multi-spectral-spatial resolution and multi-swath width problem to a great extent, and achieve an improved urban classification accuracy.