Recovering defective Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus images via multiple linear regression model

Since 2003, the scan line corrector (SLC) of the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor has failed permanently, inhibiting the retrieval or scanning of 22% of the pixels in each Landsat 7 SLC‐off image. This utter failure has seriously limited the scientific applications and usability of ETM+ data. Precise and complete recovery of the missing pixels for the Landsat 7 SLC‐off images is a challenging issue and developing an efficient gap‐fill algorithm with improved ETM+ data usability has been ever‐demanding. In this study, a new gap filling method has been introduced to reconstruct the SLC‐off images via multi‐temporal SLC‐off auxiliary fill images. A correlation is established between the corresponding pixels in the target SLC‐off image and two auxiliary fill images in parallel using the multiple linear regressions model. Both simulated and actual defective Landsat 7 images were tested to assess the performance of the proposed model by comparing with two multi‐temporal data based methods, the local linear histogram matching method and Neighbourhood Similar Pixel Interpolator method. The quantitative evaluations indicate that the proposed method makes an accurate estimate of the missing values even for more temporally distant fill images