Generating Red-Edge Images at 3 M Spatial Resolution by Fusing Sentinel-2 and Planet Satellite Products

Abstract

High-resolution satellite images can be used to some extent to mitigate the mixed-pixel problem caused by the lack of intensive production, farmland fragmentation, and the uneven growth of field crops in developing countries. Specifically, red-edge (RE) satellite images can be used in this context to reduce the influence of soil background at early stages as well as saturation due to crop leaf area index (LAI) at later stages. However, the availability of high-resolution RE satellite image products for research and application globally remains limited. This study uses the weight-and-unmixing algorithm as well as the SUPer-REsolution for multi-spectral Multi-resolution Estimation (Wu-SupReME) approach to combine the advantages of Sentinel-2 spectral and Planet spatial resolution and generate a high-resolution RE product. The resultant fused image is highly correlated (R2 > 0.98) with Sentinel-2 image and clearly illustrates the persistent advantages of such products. This fused image was significantly more accurate than the originals when used to predict heterogeneous wheat LAI and therefore clearly illustrated the persistence of Sentinel-2 spectral and Planet spatial advantage, which indirectly proved that the fusion methodology of generating high-resolution red-edge products from Planet and Sentinel-2 images is possible. This study provided method reference for multi-source data fusion and image product for accurate parameter inversion in quantitative remote sensing of vegetation.