VOLUME 74, NUMBER 6
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE
SENSING
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRY
AND REMOTE SENSING
The cover shows imagery from an airborne hyperspectral survey
undertaken in Afghanistan during August - October
2007. Under a USGS contract, Australian companies
HyVista Corp (www.hyvista.com) and Integrated Spectronics
modified a HyMap sensor to operate from a high
altitude aircraft with the objective of imaging most of
Afghanistan.
The background image covers an area of 25,000 square
kms. The left inset illustrates mineral maps derived from
SWIR and shows the distribution of a dickite-pyrophyllite
mixture (red), an amphibole-talc mixture (green) and
dolomite (blue).
The project imaged about 438,000 square kms of
Afghanistan; an area about the size of California. This
was accomplished in 28 fl ights resulting in 218 image
strips each up to 228 km long and an average width
of 16 km.
The imagery will be used to produce surficial material
and land use maps as part of the reconstruction effort
supported by the Government of Afghanistan. The rapid
and detailed mapping of alteration minerals on a country
wide basis will accelerate the revitalization of the Afghan natural resources sector and is an example of
airborne hyperspectral remote sensing moving into the mainstream of accepted and accessible remote
sensing technologies.
The aircraft photograph is by Keith. E. Livo (USGS).
For further information contact Dr. Trude King tking@usgs.gov.
A significant improvement in the classification accuracy obtained
through the fusion of optical and RADARSAT texture
measures as compared to single sensor classifications.
Examination of Principal Components Analysis, linear mixture
modeling, and supervised and unsupervised classifi cations to
map forest regrowth, agricultural crops, pasture, and other
land uses.
Classified multi-temporal Landsat imagery compared with soil
suitability and field data using raster GIS modeling to identify
regional scale patterns of cropping history.