Benefit of the future SPOT-5 and of data fusion to urban roads mapping

This article deals with the contribution of both the future SPOT-5 (which will produce images with the same bands as the existing SPOT 1-3 ones but with an improved spatial resolution) and a sensor fusion method to urban mapping. The ARSIS concept (in French: Amelioration de la Resolution Spatiale par Injection de Structures) is used for sensor fusion. It allows the improvement of spatial resolution of the multi-band images, while preserving spectral information, by use of the high frequencies of panchromatic images. A well-proven method for urban mapping is then applied to all multi-spectral images available in the context of the study. A photo-interpretation of the latter confirms the benefit of fine image resolutions to urban roads mapping, in the limit of the sensor studied here. Then, when comparing the roads surface at all resolutions with reference extracted from accurate maps of the city, we demonstrate quantitatively that the finer the resolution, the more accurate the cartography.