Spectral analysis of geological materials in the Central Volcanic Range of Costa Rica and its relationship to the remote detection of anomalies

Abstract

The aim of this work is the comparative study of methods for calculating spectral anomalies from imaging spectrometry in several test areas of the Central Volcanic Range (CVR) of Costa Rica. In the detection of anomalous responses it is assumed no prior knowledge of the targets, so that the pixels are automatically separated according to their spectral information significantly differentiated with respect to a background to be estimated, either globally for the full scene, either locally by image segmentation techniques. We used spectral ranges of visible-near infrared (VNIR), shortwave infrared (SWIR) and thermal (TIR) data cubes hiperepectrales from HyMAP airborne sensors and MASTER. We have designed experiments on natural scenes of the CVC, and semi-urban of different complexity, analyzing the behavior of the standard RX (Reed &Xiaoli, 1990) anomaly detector and different approaches based on imaging and dimensionality reduction. In this paper we propose a new technique for anomaly detection in hyperspectral data called DAFT (Detector de Anomalías de Fondo Térmico), as a Projection Pursuit (Malpica et al., 2008) variant, based on dimensionality reduction by projecting anomalies or targets with unknown spectral signature to the background, in a range thermal spectrum wavelengths. We discuss the results considering their implications on geological processes, as well as their use as terrestrial analogs for planetary exploration.