A Spatio-Temporal Fusion Framework of UAV and Satellite Imagery for Winter Wheat Growth Monitoring

Accurate and continuous monitoring of crop growth is vital for the development of precision agriculture. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite platforms have considerable complementarity in high spatial resolution (centimeter-scale) and fixed revisit cycle. It is meaningful to optimize the cross-platform synergy for agricultural applications. Considering the characteristics of UAV and satellite platforms, a spatio-temporal fusion (STF) framework of UAV and satellite imagery is developed. It includes registration, radiometric normalization, preliminary fusion, and reflectance reconstruction. The proposed STF framework significantly improves the fusion accuracy with both better quantitative metrics and visualized results compared with four existing STF methods with different fusion strategies. Especially for the prediction of object boundary and spatial texture, the absolute values of Robert’s edge (EDGE) and local binary pattern (LBP) decreased by a maximum of more than 0.25 and 0.10, respectively, compared with the spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM). Moreover, the STF framework enhances the temporal resolution to daily, although the satellite imagery is discontinuous. Further, its application potential for winter wheat growth monitoring is explored. The daily synthetic imagery with UAV spatial resolution describes the seasonal dynamics of winter wheat well. The synthetic Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index 2 (EVI2) are consistent with the observations. However, the error in NDVI and EVI2 at boundary changes is relatively large, which needs further exploration. This research provides an STF framework to generate very dense and high-spatial-resolution remote sensing data at a low cost. It not only contributes to precision agriculture applications, but also is valuable for land-surface dynamic monitoring.