Assessment of Spatial–Spectral Feature-Level Fusion for Hyperspectral Target Detection

In this work, we assess the detection and classification of specially constructed targets in coincident airborne hyperspectral imagery (HSI) and high spatial resolution panchromatic imagery (HRI) in spectral, spatial, and joint spatial-spectral feature spaces. The target discrimination powers of the data-level and feature-level fusion of HSI and HRI are also directly compared in the spatial-spectral context using airborne imagery collected explicitly for this research. We show that in the case of Bobcat 2013 imagery, feature-level fusion of the HSI spectrum with spatial features derived from the coincident HRI data consistently results in fewer false alarms on the scene background as well as fewer misclassifications among the tested targets. Furthermore, this approach also outperforms schemes in which data-level fusion of the HSI and HRI imagery is performed prior to extracting spatial-spectral features.