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One of the newer tools for remote sensing scientists is the use of hyperspectral

ID: 120089 • Letter: O

Question

One of the newer tools for remote sensing scientists is the use of hyperspectral imagery, or imagery that contains hundreds of bands encompassing a similar range of electromagnetic energy as the sensors used in today’s lab. For example, instead of having one or two bands located within the green portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (500-600nm), a hyperspectral system would easily capture over 10 bands within a given color range. Why might this data be advantageous to typical multispectral data (e.g. LandSat)? What might be some of the disadvantages of working with these images?

Explanation / Answer

The main advantage of the hyperspectral images over multi spectral images is that we can identify smallest spectral characteristics in the image. This is useful in mineral exploration as two or more minerals' sprectra would be closer to each other (eg green), in a multispectral image, it would be shown as only one mineral, but in a hyperspectral image, it would be shown as three distinctive minerals.

The major disadvantage of the hyperspectral images is the capacity of hard disk it occupies. The images are expensive and need super fast computers and are very complex.