The subpixel mapping technique can specify the spatial distribution of different categories at the subpixel scale by converting the abundance map into a higher resolution image, based on the assumption of spatial dependence. Traditional subpixel mapping algorithms only utilize the low-resolution image obtained by the classification image downsampling and do not consider the spectral unmixing error, which is difficult to account for in real applications. In this paper, to improve the accuracy of the subpixel mapping, an adaptive subpixel mapping method based on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) model and a winner-take-all class determination strategy, namely, AMCDSM, is proposed for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery. In AMCDSM, to better simulate a real remotesensing scene, the low-resolution abundance images are obtained by the spectral unmixing method from the downsampled original image or real low-resolution images.
The MAP model is extended by considering the spatial prior models (Laplacian, total variation (TV), and bilateral TV) to obtain the high-resolution subpixel distribution map. To avoid the setting of the regularization parameter, an adaptive parameter selection method is designed to acquire the optimal subpixel mapping results. In addition, in AMCDSM, to take into account the spectral unmixing error in real applications, a winner-take-all strategy is proposed to achieve a better subpixel mapping result. The proposed method was tested on simulated, synthetic, and real hyperspectral images, and the experimental results demonstrate that the AMCDSM algorithm outperforms the traditional subpixel mapping methods and provides a simple and efficient algorithm to regularize the ill-posed subpixel mapping problem.