Super-resolution: an efficient method to improve spatial resolution of hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral imaging is a continuously growing area of remote sensing application. The wide spectral range, providing a very high spectral resolution, allows to detect and classify surfaces and chemical elements of the observed image. The main problem of hyperspectral data is that the high spectral resolution is usually complementary to the spatial one, which can vary from a few to tens of meters. Many factors, such as imperfect imaging optics, atmospheric scattering, secondary illumination effects and sensor noise cause a degradation of the acquired image quality, making the spatial resolution one of the most expensive and hardest to improve in imaging systems. In this work, a novel method, based on the use of source separation technique and a spatial regularization step by simulated annealing is proposed to improve the spatial resolution of cover classification maps. Experiments have been carried out on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.