TS2uRF: A New Method for Sharpening Thermal Infrared Satellite Imagery

Thermal infrared (TIR) imagery is normally acquired at coarser pixel resolution than that of shortwave sensors on the same satellite platform. TIR resolution is often not suitable for monitoring crop conditions of fragmented farming lands, e.g., the accurate estimates of evapotranspiration (ET) based on surface energy balance from remote sensing for irrigation water management. Consequently, thermal sharpening techniques have been developed to sharpen TIR imagery to a shortwave band pixel resolution. However, most methods concentrate on the visual effects of the thermal sharpened images, and they treat the pixels as independent samples without considering their spatial context, which can give rise to adverse effects such as artifacts. In this work, a new thermal sharpening method called TS2uRF is proposed. The potential of superpixels (SP) combined with regression random forest (RRF) have been used to augment the spatial resolution of the Landsat 8 TIR (100 m) imagery to their visible (VIS) spatial resolution (30 m). The SP has allowed the contextual information on the land cover to be integrated, and RRF has allowed the relationship between five spectral indices and TIR data to be integrated into a single model. The TIR sharpened images obtained using the TS2uRF were compared with images obtained using the TsHARP, one of the most classic thermal sharpening techniques, evaluating the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and structural similarity index (SSIM) for measuring image quality. In all of the cases evaluated, the RMSE and SSIM of the images sharpened using the TS2uRF method outperform those obtained using TsHARP. In particular, the TS2uRF method has an average error of 1.14 °C (RMSE) lower than TsHARP, regarding SSIM, TS2uRF outperforms TsHARP on average by 0.218 . From the visual comparison, it has been shown that the TS2uRF methodology avoids the artifacts that appear in the enhanced images using the TsHARP method.