Integration of contextual knowledge in unsupervised sub-pixel classification

In this paper, we investigate the use of coarse image features for predicting class label distributions at a finer scale. The major contributions of this work are 1) use of coarse image features to improve the optimization formulation of conventional rank based approaches 2) use of inter class compatibility information from coarse images to refine the predicted target distribution 3) an enhanced unsupervised variogram based sub-pixel mapping approach 4) inclusion of abundance estimation uncertainty in the unmixing process. The proposed modifications on rank based and variogram based approaches have produced an accuracy improvement of 10–15%. The sensitivities of these approaches towards tunable parameters are also analyzed.