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ARS Home » Plains Area » Bushland, Texas » Conservation and Production Research Laboratory » Soil and Water Management Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #271189
Title: A review of potential image fusion methods for remote sensing-based irrigation management: Part II

Author
item Ha, Wonsook
item Gowda, Prasanna
item Howell, Terry

Submitted to: Irrigation Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/25/2012
Publication Date: 6/6/2013
Citation: Ha, W., Gowda, P., Howell, T.A. 2013. A review of potential image fusion methods for remote sensing-based irrigation management: Part II. Irrigation Science. 31(4):851-869.

Interpretive Summary: Estimating an accurate evapotranspiration (ET) image has been considered important in agricultural research for water management, to improve estimation of crop water requirements and to promote more precise irrigation scheduling. Land surface temperature (LST) maps are utilized to estimate accurate ET maps. In order to investigate methods to obtain high spatial resolution maps of LST and ET, image fusion methods have been considered. This paper (part II) reviews methods for image fusion and provides insight of using image fusion methods in retrieving accurate LST and ET images. Literature review indicated that the great possibility of applying image fusion methods exists to retrieve higher spatial resolution of LST and ET images for precision agriculture.

Technical Abstract: Satellite-based sensors provide data at either greater spectral and coarser spatial resolutions, or lower spectral and finer spatial resolutions due to complementary spectral and spatial characteristics of optical sensor systems. In order to overcome this limitation, image fusion has been suggested to obtain higher spatial and spectral resolution images at the same time. Image fusion methods have been applied to merge coarser spatial resolution of multispectral images with a finer spatial resolution panchromatic image to enhance visual apprehension and to provide more informative images. Image fusion has been a valuable technique in digital image analysis and comparison because of the availability of multispatial and multispectral image data from satellite and airborne sensors. The part I companion paper presented and discussed the image downscaling methods. In this paper (part II), the main objective is to review existing image fusion methods for their capability of downscaling low spatial resolution images for irrigation management applications. A literature review indicated that image fusion methods have not been used actively in obtaining land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET) images for irrigation management. However, the literature review revealed that there is a great potential of applying image fusion methods to retrieve higher spatial resolution of LST and ET images for irrigation management.