Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Edited by

Dr. Dipanwita Dutta

Remote Sensing is the science and art of obtaining information about an object, area, or phenomenon
through the analysis of data acquired by a device that is not in contact with the object, area, or
phenomenon under investigation. This is usually in the form of an image acquired at a distance from
the surface. Multispectral remote sensing data have been potentially explored worldwide for various
applications. One of the major limitations of the multispectral data is that the sensors operate in broad
wavelength bands thus limiting the amount of spectral information available. Hyperspectral sensors
record reflected electromagnetic energy from the Earth surface across the electromagnetic spectrum
extending from the visible wavelength region through the near-infrared and mid-infrared region (0.3μm
to 2.5μm) in tens to hundreds of narrow (in the order of 10nm) contiguous bands. Such narrow
bandwidths results in an almost continuous and detailed spectral response for each pixel providing
accurate and precise information about its constituents and is clearly an advantage over multispectral
imaging. The high spectral resolution of a hyperspectral sensor allows us to capture small deviations in
the spectral response of the materials thus aiding in their identification. Figure 1 depicts a typical
Hyperspectral datacube and the spectrum of a single pixel.
Figure 1 Hyperion Image cube and reflectance spectrum
 The pre-processing of Hyperspectral Dataset

The pre-processing approach adopted in this thesis involves:

• Bad band removal i.e. removing the bands with no information,
• Along track destriping (bad line removal) and
• Atmospheric corrections to convert the radiance to reflectance.
1. Bad Band Removal
Hyperion level L1R data has 242 bands out of which only 198 are nonzero i.e. a few were intentionally
left unused (Bands 1 to 7 and 225 to 242) and others fall in the overlap region of the two spectrometers
(Bands 58 to 76). Among the non zero bands, four band are still in the overlap region of the two
spectrometers i.e. bands 56, 57 and 77, 78 out of which bands 77 and 78 were eliminated because of
the higher noise levels present in those bands, which left us with 196 unique bands. Then there are water
vapour absorption bands which needs to be eliminated and are identified as bands120 to 132 (1346nm
to 1467 nm), bands 165-182 (1800 to 1971 nm) and bands 221 (above 2356) and higher. Water vapour
absorption bands absorb all the incident solar energy and can be easily identified visually. The number
of bands to be used for further analysis is decided by the user based on the application. However, the
list of bands which are eliminated including the water absorption bands is given below in Table 1.
Table 1: List of Unused Bands of the Hyperion Sensor, L1R product

Bands Description
1 to 7 Not Illuminated
58 to 78 Overlap Region
120 to 132 Water Vapour Absorption Band
165 to 182 Water Vapour Absorption Band
185 to 187 Identified by Hyperion Bad Band List
221 to 224 Water Vapour Absorption Band
225 to 242 Not Illuminated

The steps for band selection are given below and are also illustrated in Figure 3.1.
1. From the ENVI menu bar select Basic Tools 🡪 Resize Data(Spatial Spectral)
2. In the Resize Data Input File window select the File and click Spectral Subset
3. In the File Spectral Subset dialog box Select the desired bands manually or click Apply BBL
and then click OK
4. Click OK in Resize Data Input File window and give the output filename.
Band Selection Using Spectral Subsetting

Figure 2. Spectral Subset

2. Along Track Destriping

There are a number of corrupted pixels and dark vertical stripes in the Hyperion datasets that are caused
by calibration differences in Hyperion detector array and temporal variations in the detector response.
The vertical stripes are in the along-track direction and appear as a series of stripes either along the
whole length of the image or intermittently and are also referred to as striping noise. These vertical
stripes and the corrupted pixels are referred to as abnormal pixels. These abnormal pixels must be
accounted for and corrected before further processing.
According to Han et al. majority abnormal pixels in the Hyperion images appear as vertical stripes
and can be classified into 4 categories:
 Class1 - continuous with atypical DN values - extremely small DN values, usually zero
 Class2 - continuous with low DN values - low DN values compared to adjacent columns
 Class3 - intermittent with atypical DN values - extremely small DN values
 Class4 - intermittent with lower DN values - low DN values compared to neighbouring
pixels
The figures below show examples of different types of abnormal pixels in the Hyperion data. Figure.
3. a) shows the Class 1 type of abnormal pixels by taking a spatial subset from the Hyperion image and
Figure 3 b) shows the corrected image after correcting the image using Hyperiontools.sav.

a) Original Band b) Band after correction

Figure 3 a) Class 1 Abnormal pixels: Continuous with atypical DN values, Band 99 and b) Band after
correction using Hyperion tools.sav
The level L1R Hyperion dataset contains a number of bands containing a series of vertical stripes which
are left for the user to correct according to its convenience. While generating the bad band list the
hyperiontools.sav utility of ENVI uses the flag mask correction for detecting and correcting the
continuous vertical stripes and the abnormal pixels with atypical values.
3. FLAASH (Fast Line-of-Sight Atmospheric Analysis of the Spectral Hypercubes)
ENVI’s FLAASH module is a model for retrieving spectral reflectance from hyperspectral radiance
images and was developed by Spectral Sciences, Inc., under the sponsorship of the U.S. Air Force
Research Laboratory. It compensates for atmospheric effects and corrects wavelengths in the visible
region of electromagnetic spectrum through NIR and SWIR region. FLAASH has inbuilt support for
hyperspectral sensors such as Hyperion, AVIRIS, HYDICE, HYMAP,Probe-1, CASI and multispectral
sensors such as Landsat, SPOT, IRS, AVHRR, ASTER etc.
Data Requirements
• The input to FLAASH atmospheric correction module must be a radiometrically calibrated
radiance image in BIL or BIP format.
• For water retrieval the image bands must cover at least one of the following ranges at 15nm or
better spectral resolution:

✓ 770 – 870 nm (for the 820 nm water feature)

✓ 870 – 1020 nm (for the 940 nm water feature)

✓ 1050 – 1210 nm (for the 1135 nm water feature)

• Wavelengths, FWHM values must be available in ENVI header files or as separate ASCII
files.
• Scale factors in ASCII format to convert radiance image into floating point values (units:
µW/cm2 nm sr) which is the required FLAASH input data format
Conversion to BIP/BIL Format
Figure 3.6 FLAASH Atmospheric Correction Model Input Parameters dialog box
4. The various Input and Output parameters required to be entered are listed below
• Input radiance image (in BIL or BIP format)
• Output filename
• Output directory – Directory to which FLAASH results are stored
• Root name – prefix which is appended to all the output FLAASH filenames
• Latitude and Longitude of the centre of the scene
• Sensor type – select the name of the sensor which acquired the radiance data
• Sensor altitude (km) – altitude of the sensor when the image was collected,
• Ground elevation (km) of the area – average scene elevation
• Pixel size (m) – image pixel sixe used for adjacency effect correction
• Flight date and Time GMT (HH:MM:SS)
• Atmospheric Model – The Atmospheric Model is selected is selected based on seasonal
latitude surface temperature model as shown in Table 3.3.
Table 2 Atmospheres Based on Latitudinal/Seasonal Dependence of Surface Temperature
Latitude January March May July Septembe Novembe
(oN) r r
80 SAW SAW SAW MLW MLW SAW
70 SAW SAW MLW MLW MLW SAW
60 MLW MLW MLW SAS SAS MLW
50 MLW MLW SAS SAS SAS SAS
 40 SAS SAS SAS MLS MLS SAS
30 MLS MLS MLS T T MLS
20 T T T T T T
10 T T T T T T
0 T T T T T T
-10 T T T T T T
-20 T T T MLS MLS T
-30 MLS MLS MLS MLS MLS MLS
-40 SAS SAS SAS SAS SAS SAS
-50 SAS SAS SAS MLW MLW SAS
-60 MLW MLW MLW MLW MLW MLW
-70 MLW MLW MLW MLW MLW MLW
-80 MLW MLW MLW SAW MLW MLW

Where,
SAW - Sub-Arctic Winter
MLW - Mid-Latitude Winter
SAS - Sub-Arctic Summer
MLS - Mid-Latitude Summer
T - Tropical
• Water Retrieval - FLAASH includes a method for retrieving the water amount for each pixel.
This technique produces a more accurate correction than using a constant water amount for the entire
scene. To use this water retrieval method, the image must have bands that span at least one of the
following ranges at a spectral resolution of 15 nm or better:

✓ 1050-1210 nm (for the 1135 nm water feature)

✓ 870-1020 nm (for the 940 nm water feature)

✓ 770-870 nm (for the 820 nm water feature)

• Aerosol Model - The model choices are as follows:

✓ Rural: Represents aerosols in areas not strongly affected by urban or industrial sources. The
particle sizes are a blend of two distributions, one large and one small.

✓ Urban: A mixture of 80% rural aerosol with 20% soot-like aerosols, appropriate for high-
density urban/industrial areas.
✓ Maritime: Represents the boundary layer over oceans or continents under a prevailing wind
from the ocean. It is composed of two components, one from sea spray and another from rural
continental aerosol (that omits the largest particles).

✓ Tropospheric: Applies to calm, clear (visibility greater than 40 km) conditions over land and
consists of the small-particle component of the rural model.
• Aerosol Retrieval

✓ None: When you select this option, the value in the Initial Visibility (tm) field is used for the
aerosol model (described in the following section).

✓ 2-Band (K-T): Use the aerosol retrieval method. If no suitable dark pixels are found, then the
value in the Initial Visibility field is used.
• Initial Visibility (Km)

✓ In the Initial Visibility field, enter an estimate of the scene visibility in kilometers. An estimate
of visibility during different conditions is given in Table 3.4
Table 3 Scene Visibility options
Weather Conditions Scene Visibility
Clear 40 – 100 Km
Moderate Haze 20-30 Km
Thick Haze 15 km or less

• Spectral Polishing - Polishing is a term for a linear renormalization method that reduces
spectral artifacts in Hyperspectral data using only the data itself.
The basic assumptions are as follows: –

✓ The artifacts may be removed by applying a uniform linear transformation (that is, channel-
dependent gain factors and offsets) to the spectra.

✓ Spectrally smooth reference pixels (for example, soil or pavement) can be found within the
scene from which the transformation can be derived.

✓ The true spectra of the reference pixels can be approximated by applying a spectral smoothing
operation.
A larger number generates more smoothing. A value of 9 is recommended for typical 10 nm-
resolution hyperspectral sensors (such as AVIRIS). A value of 2 provides minimal smoothing but
removes odd-even spectral band imbalances. Odd polishing widths are slightly more computationally
efficient. Spectral polishing requires hyperspectral input data, and is therefore disabled when a
multispectral sensor type is selected.
• Wavelength Recalibration - An accurate wavelength calibration is critical for atmospherically
correcting Hyperspectral data. Even slight errors in the locations of the band center wavelengths can
introduce significant errors into the water retrieval process, and reduce the overall accuracy of the
modeled surface reflectance results. To minimize such errors, FLAASH includes a method for
identifying and correcting wavelength miscalibrations. AVIRIS, HYDICE, HYMAP, HYPERION,
CASI, and AISA sensors are automatically supported for wavelength recalibration.