The application of terrain classification techniques to visible near infra-red and thermal infra-red imagery

Abstract

The research presented in this thesis was sponsored by the Ministry of Technology and carried out in the Physics Department of Bedford College, University of London, under the supervision of Dr. E.S. Owen Jones. The work was concerned with the 'Physics' aspect of Remote Sensing of the terrain whilst parallel, co-ordinated research into the ground-related aspects of the project were investigated by a Research Student in the Geography Department and supervised by Professor M.M. Cole.

Photographic emulsions were used to sense the visible and near infra-red radiation reflected by the terrain and an infra-red line-scanner detected the longer wave infra-red (3.5--5.5microm) radiation emitted from the ground.

The research studied two particular aspects in detail; Data Acquisition and Data Analysis.

The investigations into data acquisition required an examination into the factors affecting the various types of radiation as well as equipment calibration procedures.

The analysis of the data obtained with cameras was treated quantitatively whilst the imagery derived from the line-scanner was of degraded quality and only visual interpretation techniques were applied.

The research carried out has made contributions in two areas. Firstly it has provided greater understanding of the manner in which remote sensing exercises should be undertaken in order to reduce experimental errors. Secondly, the difficulties associated with the analysis of remotely sensed data were studied and several useful unsupervised cluster analysis strategies have been proposed and investigated.