The new hyperspectral satellite prisma: Imagery for forest types discrimination

Different forest types based on different tree species composition may have similar spectral signatures if observed with traditional multispectral satellite sensors. Hyperspectral imagery, with a more continuous representation of their spectral behavior may instead be used for their classification. The new hyperspectral Precursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa (PRISMA) sensor, developed by the Italian Space Agency, is able to capture images in a continuum of 240 spectral bands ranging between 400 and 2500 nm, with a spectral resolution smaller than 12 nm. The new sensor can be employed for a large number of remote sensing applications, including forest types discrimination. In this study, we compared the capabilities of the new PRISMA sensor against the well-known Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) in recognition of different forest types through a pairwise separability analysis carried out in two study areas in Italy, using two different nomenclature systems and four separability metrics. The PRISMA hyperspectral sensor, compared to Sentinel-2 MSI, allowed for a better discrimination in all forest types, increasing the performance when the complexity of the nomenclature system also increased. PRISMA achieved an average improvement of 40% for the discrimination between two forest categories (coniferous vs. broadleaves) and of 102% in the discrimination between five forest types based on main tree species groups

Angle Distance-Based Hierarchical Background Separation Method for Hyperspectral Imagery Target Detection

Traditional detectors for hyperspectral imagery (HSI) target detection (TD) output the result after processing the HSI only once. However, using the prior target information only once is not sufficient, as it causes the inaccuracy of target extraction or the unclean separation of the background. In this paper, the target pixels are located by a hierarchical background separation method, which explores the relationship between the target and the background for making better use of the prior target information more than one time. In each layer, there is an angle distance (AD) between each pixel spectrum in HSI and the given prior target spectrum. The AD between the prior target spectrum and candidate target ones is smaller than that of the background pixels. The AD metric is utilized to adjust the values of pixels in each layer to gradually increase the separability of the background and the target. For making better discrimination, the AD is calculated through the whitened data rather than the original data. Besides, an elegant and ingenious smoothing processing operation is employed to mitigate the influence of spectral variability, which is beneficial for the detection accuracy. The experimental results of three real hyperspectral images show that the proposed method outperforms other classical and recently proposed HSI target detection algorithms