Due to the trade-off between the temporal and spatial resolution of thermal spaceborne sensors, super-resolution methods have been developed to provide fine-scale Land SurfaceTemperature (LST) maps. Most of them are trained at low resolution but applied at fine resolution, and so they require a scale-invariance hypothesis that is not always adapted. Themain contribution of this work is the introduction of a Scale-Invariance-Free approach for training Neural Network (NN) models, and the implementation of two NN models, calledScale-Invariance-Free Convolutional Neural Network for Super-Resolution (SIF-CNN-SR) for the super-resolution of MODIS LST products. The Scale-Invariance-Free approach consists ontraining the models in order to provide LST maps at high spatial resolution that recover the initial LST when they are degraded at low resolution and that contain fine-scale texturesinformed by the high resolution NDVI. The second contribution of this work is the release of a test database with ASTER LST images concomitant with MODIS ones that can be usedfor evaluation of super-resolution algorithms. We compare the two proposed models, SIF-CNN-SR1 and SIF-CNN-SR2, with four state-of-the-art methods, Bicubic, DMS, ATPRK, Tsharp,and a CNN sharing the same architecture as SIF-CNN-SR but trained under the scale-invariance hypothesis. We show that SIF-CNN-SR1 outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and the other two CNN models as evaluated with LPIPS and Fourier space metrics focusing on the analysis of textures. These results and the available ASTER-MODIS database for evaluation are promising for future studies on super-resolution of LST.

Hybrid modeling, that is the combination of data-driven and theory-driven modeling, has recently raised a lot of attention. The integration of physical models in machine learning has indeed demonstrated promising properties such as improved interpolation and extrapolation capabilities and increased interpretability [1, 2]. Conventional machine learning models learn correlations, from a training data set, in order to map observations to targets or latent representations, with the hope to generalize to new data. While many different models could perfectly fit the training data, the assumptions made during the learning process (from the model architecture to the learning algorithm itself), sometimes called inductive biases [3, 4], are crucial to obtain high generalization performances. In contrast, hybrid models are partially grounded on deductive biases, i.e. assumptions derived, in our context, from physics models that generalize, by nature, to out-of-distribution data. Therefore, in various fields for which the data distribution is governed by physical laws, such as fluid dynamics, thermodynamics or solid mechanics, hybrid modeling has recently become a hot topic [5, 6, 7].

Blind source separation is a common processing tool to analyse the constitution of pixels of hyperspectral images. Such methods usually suppose that pure pixel spectra (endmembers) are the same in all the image for each class of materials. In the framework of remote sensing, such an assumption is no more valid in the presence of intra-class variabilities due to illumination conditions, weathering, slight variations of the pure materials, etc... In this paper, we first describe the results of investigations highlighting intra-class variability measured in real images. Considering these results, a new formulation of the linear mixing model is presented leading to two new methods. Unconstrained Pixel-by-pixel NMF (UP-NMF) is a new blind source separation method based on the assumption of a linear mixing model, which can deal with intra-class variability. To overcome UP-NMF limitations an extended method is proposed, named Inertia-constrained Pixel-by-pixel NMF (IP-NMF). For each sensed spectrum, these extended versions of NMF extract a corresponding set of source spectra. A constraint is set to limit the spreading of each source's estimates in IP-NMF. The methods are tested on a semi-synthetic data set built with spectra extracted from a real hyperspectral image and then numerically mixed. We thus demonstrate the interest of our methods for realistic source variabilities. Finally, IP-NMF is tested on a real data set and it is shown to yield better performance than state of the art methods.