On the effects of spatial and spectral resolution on spatial-spectral target detection in SHARE 2012 and Bobcat 2013 hyperspectral imagery

Abstract

Previous work with the Bobcat 2013 data set 1 showed that spatial-spectral feature extraction on visible to near infrared (VNIR) hyperspectral imagery (HSI) led to better target detection and discrimination than spectralonly techniques; however, the aforementioned study could not consider the possible benefits of the shortwaveinfrared (SWIR) portion of the spectrum due to data limitations. In addition, the spatial resolution of the Bobcat 2013 imagery was fixed at 8cm without exploring lower spatial resolutions. In this work, we evaluate the tradeoffs in spatial and spectral resolution and spectral coverage between for a common set of targets in terms of their effects on spatial-spectral target detection performance. We show that for our spatial-spectral target detection scheme and data sets, the adaptive cosine estimator (ACE) applied to S-DAISY and pseudo Zernike moment (PZM) spatial-spectral features can distinguish between targets better than ACE applied only to the spectral imagery. In particular, S-DAISY operating on bands uniformly selected from the SWIR portion of ProSpecTIR-VS sensor imagery in conjunction with bands closely corresponding to the Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Reconnaissance (ARCHER) sensor's VNIR bands (80 total) led to the best overall average perfomance in both target detection and discrimination.