Application of Remote Sensing Data in Lithological Discrimination of Kerdous Inlier in the Anti Atlas Belt of Morocco

Remote sensing data reveals a great importance for lithological mapping due to their spatial, spectral and radiometric characteristics. Lithological mapping using spatial data is a preliminary and important step to mineral mapping. In this work, several spectral and radiometric transformations methods were applied on Landsat 8 OLI data to enhance lithological units in the study area situated in the Anti Atlas belt. The methods of Optimum Index Factor (OIF), Decorrelation Stretching (DS), Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Band Ratioing (BR) showed good results for lithological mapping in comparison with the existing geological and field investigation. An RGB color composite of OLI bands 651 was developed for mapping lithological units of the study area by fusing optimum index factor (OIF) and decorrelation stretching methods. furthermore, Band ratios derived from image spectra were applied in two RGB color composites (7+4/2, PC1, PC2)  and (PC1, 7/6, 3/7) providing good discrimination of the lithological units. The Landsat-8 OLI data significantly provided satisfied results for lithological mapping

Assessment of radarsat-1, ALOS PALSAR and sentinel-1 SAR satellite images for geological lineament mapping

Lineament mapping is a very important step in geological studies and mineral exploration, with the evolution of remote sensing, processing methods as well as the availability of several optical and radar satellite data, lineaments can be detected without using traditional methods. The objective of this work is to recommend the most suitable data for lineaments to be used in the field of geological science, by comparing the performance of three different RADAR data, namely ALOS PALSAR (The Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar), Radarsat-1 and Sentinel-1 for automatic lineament extraction using a combination of edge detection and line linking algorithms. The methodology consists to link between the length, number, orientation and density of lineaments with surface characteristics such as the slope, faults, lithology, discontinuities and mineral veins. The results obtained show that the extracted lineaments from Sentinel-1 VH polarization have a better correlation with geological units, tectonic system direction, as well as shading and slope maps, which is due to the effectiveness of VH polarization, which is independent of soil properties compared to the other polarizations that have shown an overestimation of the lineaments

Mapping copper mineralization using EO-1 Hyperion data fusion with Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2A in Moroccan Anti-Atlas

In Morocco, the oriental Anti-Atlas encompasses many valuable deposits, including that of copper (Cu) which is located in the Sidi Flah-Bouskour inlier. This deposit is known for its high importance on the national scale. The present work aims to compare the Hyperion raw and fused data for mapping Cu mineralization. After applying the pre-processing steps on the images used, the fusion (hyperspectral/multispectral) process was done using the colour normalized spectral sharpening method. Subsequently, the mineralogical mapping task was performed using the mixture tuned matched filtering and the independent component analysis methods. In the last step, a geophysical data, a field survey and spectroradiometric measurements were done for checking and validating the results obtained. The analysis showed a high performance of the fused images for mineralogical mapping. Consequently, the methodology proposed can be exploited in mineralogical mapping, and also in other remote sensing works