Characterization of urban materials in AVIRIS-NG data using a mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) approach

Abstract

Assessment of energy fluxes and surface-atmosphere energy balance is considered an important study for an urban environment. The arrangement of manmade impervious surfaces (building and roads), their geometry and orientation, material composition, albedo/emissivity, topography, natural and delineated spaces of vegetation, and the concurrent atmospheric profiles together play a pivotal role in defining the urban morphological environment at micro-scale. Hyperspectral remote sensing images can prove to be instrumental in identifying the inherent material characteristics of the urban surfaces. The study focuses on identifying six man-made (asphalt, concrete, tin, iron, china mosaic, HDPE) and five natural features (lake water, river water, trees, soil, grass) in the city of Ahmedabad, India using ISRO-NASA airborne campaign hyperspectral data captured on February 11, 2016 under the Airborne Visible and InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer – Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG), of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA bearing a spatial resolution of 8.1 m. The dimensionality reduction of the reflectance data was performed using a standard shift difference method in minimum noise fraction (MNF) technique by retaining the bands possessing coherent signals and dismissing the noise component within the data. The MNF data was further exposed to a partial linear spectral unmixing approach of mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) possessing the dual character of maximizing the target endmember response and suppressing the background redundant noisy information by a filtering and tuning process. It was observed that the overall accuracy of identification of various materials using random checkpoints (ranging from 50 to 200) varied from 82.3% to 87.7%. High accuracy was observed in the natural features than the man-made features/materials. The knowledge of materials in an urban purlieu shall aid in understanding the urban environment in terms of energy demand and energy-balance and further help in deciphering the cause of urban heating.

Keywords:

• Urban environment
• urban materials
• MNF
• MTMF

Acknowledgements

The authors would thank former Director, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing; Director, Space Applications Centre (SAC); Director, National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) and the team of ISRO-NASA AVIRIS-NG mission for procuring and making the airborne hyperspectral data available. We are thankful to editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).