LAND COVER MAPPING CAPABILITY OF MULTISPECTRAL THERMAL DATA: THE

TASI-600 CASE STUDY

M. F. Carfora*, A. Palombo**, S. Pascucci**, S. Pignatti** and F. Santini**

*National Research Council, Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo "Mauro Picone" (CNR IAC),
80131 Napoli, Italy (a.carfora@iac.cnr.it)
**National Research Council, Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (CNR IMAA),
85050 Tito Scalo (PZ), Italy (federico.santini@imaa.cnr.it)

ABSTRACT applications [7], the advances made in the sensor technology

This study shows the land cover mapping accuracy
retrievable by the TASI-600 thermal airborne multispectral
sensor and describes some of the classification results tested
on the thermal preprocessed data for a rural area.
In the paper is provided an overview of the principal
TASI-600 characteristics, i.e. 32 spectral bands in the 8.0-
11.5 μm spectral range, and land cover classification
performances. A full assessment of the TASI-600 spectral
bands has been also obtained by ranking them in order to
understanding their role in land cover classification.
Results accuracies have been validated using available
ground truth. The study highlights that the new generation
of multi/hyperspectral thermal sensors opens up interesting
opportunities for accurate land cover classification.
Index Terms — TASI-600, multispectral thermal data,
land cover mapping, classification accuracies.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the last decades optical hyperspectral remote sensing
has been applied to understand and solve problems related
to Earth surface processes in the framework of different
applications such as agriculture, forest, geology,
archaeology, land degradation, coastal zones, crisis
information [1, 2].
Moreover, there is a raising interest in applying remote
sensing data in the thermal infrared spectral domain (LWIR
range; 8.0–14.0 μm). The use of remote sensing data in the
LWIR spectral range alone or joint to the VSWIR domain is
producing new powerful results for detecting and
identifying surface materials, soil and plant properties,
pollutants and gases detection [3-5].
LWIR multi/hyperspectral data has been applied in the
past in remote sensing research studies almost to map
variations in surface and mineral composition [6]. Starting
from TIMS, MODIS or ASTER multispectral satellite
thermal data that have been applied for different studies and
in the TIR domain have allowed the increasingly use of IR
cooled detectors for the deployment of new airborne IR
hyperspectral spectrometers. Among them, the AHI and the
SEBASS and recently the TASI-600 (ITRES), the TELOPS
(FIRST), and the AisaOWL (SPECIM) sensors are all
operating in the LWIR range [3-5, 8].
Within this context, the paper describes the TASI-600 [9]
sensor characteristics’ and land cover classification results
tested on the thermal preprocessed data in a rural area in
Belgium.
Concerning the classifiers tested in this study, at present
there are several methodologies for classifying vegetation
multispectral images and even if standard univariate (i.e.,
single spectral band) classification techniques can be
adapted for application to hyperspectral data, their
effectiveness is often reduced by the presence of redundant
or irrelevant information in the multivariate data set
procedures. To cope with performance and accuracy
problems associated with high dimensionality, it is
commonplace to apply a pre-processing step that transforms
the data to a space of significantly lower dimension with
limited loss of the information present in the original data
[10]. Therefore, this paper applies a feature extraction and
dimension reduction algorithm based on discriminant
analysis for supervised classification. The features produced
by our procedure in the transformed space are uncorrelated
or independent, so that the multivariate density estimates
characterizing each class are replaced by univariate product
estimators; moreover, since parametric densities do not
adequately represent land categories, we estimate these
univariate densities nonparametrically [10, 11].
2. TASI SENSOR DATA
TASI-600 is a 32 bands multispectral sensor in the 8.0-
11.5 μm spectral range, with a swath of 600 pixels for a
FOV of 40° and an IFOV of 1.2 mrad. TASI-600 sensor is
designed with custom athermal optics which removes the
need for internal environmental control systems that can fail
and produce electronic noise thus assuring a diffraction-
limited sensor. The TASI-600 system is composed by the
Scan Head Unit (SHU) provided with a custom Stirling
Cycle cooled MCT detector (HgCdTe) and the Instrument
Control Unit (ICU) and also of licensed pre-processing
software to radiometrically correct (RADCORR) and
geometrically correct (GEOCOR) TASI data. RADCORR
removes system offsets (i.e. dark current) and data can be
output as spectral mSRU radiance units (1 mSRU is equal to
1 nW cm-2 sr-2 nm-1) or apparent temperatures; while, the
GEOCOR software incorporates photogrammetric bundle
adjustment solutions to produce orthorectified images using
precision IMU/GPS and terrain height data. The instrument
was mounted on a Partenavia P68 Observer airborne (Fig. 1)
and the imagery was acquired June, 2010 on a rural flat area
of an airfield in Belgium where different land covers occur.
The land cover classes considered in this study are: #1
dry grass, #2 apple trees, #3 sugar beet 1, #4 grass, #5
potatoes, #6 sugar beet 2, #7 wheat, #8 new asphalt, #9 old
asphalt, #10 urban, and #11 soil (the classes are reported in
Table 1 as class label). These classes were used for
retrieving the land cover capability mapping of the TASI-
600 radiances and emissivities.
3. METHODS
TASI-600 data preprocessing included first radiometric
correction of the data by using the RADCORR software
provided by ITRES (Canada) and the application of a new
correction tool for blinking pixel correction, developed by
CNR IMAA (Italy). More in detail, TASI-600 data has been
re-processed to refine the radiometric accuracy and to apply
a new procedure to solve the blinking pixels correction
problem affecting thermal MCT sensors.
Standard preprocessing procedures (e.g., those
implemented in the ENVI 5 software) for thermal
atmospheric correction and temperature-emissivity
separation were then applied. Regarding the atmospheric
correction of the spectral radiances, it was performed by
applying the ISAC (In-Scene Atmospheric Compensation)
algorithm [12]. This algorithm is a well established and
commonly used for in scene atmospheric thermal data
correction and assumes two pixels of the scene to be
blackbodies on which neither locations nor temperatures are
known. The ISAC algorithm is suitable when the
atmospheric radiative conditions are not available during the
acquisition time as in our case. For this study, we have
applied the “most hits” method as described by [12] and
pixels whose emissivity was equal to 1 at the wavelength
were used as a marker.
Once the images were atmospherically corrected, the
TES method used for this study to separate temperature and
emissivity is a widely used method in the literature, i.e. the
“emissivity normalization routine” [13]. This routine derives
first the brightness temperature of each pixel from the pixel
radiance. Next, the apparent emissivity image is obtained by
normalizing the radiance of each pixel to the Planck’s curve
that is generated from the pixel with the maximum
brightness temperature with an emissivity value set to 0.96,
i.e., a reasonable hypothesis for the study area land cover.
Last, TASI radiances and emissivities images were
orthorectified by using the GEOCORR software obtaining
an accuracy of 2 pixels (i.e. 2 m).
As regard the classification methods applied to the
corrected radiance and emissivity imagery, it is well known
that classification of TASI-600 imagery aims at
discriminating different objects (in our case different land
cover types) using multivariate information coming from
several spectral bands. Thus the problem is to assign an
unknown subject to one of k classes on the basis of a
multivariate observation. In discriminant analysis the
distribution of the observations in each class is characterized
by the class conditional probability density function fk. Once
assigned the a priori probability πk of observing an
individual from any of the k populations (as the relative
frequency of the classes in the labeled data, to fully exploit
the information in the training dataset, or as uniform, when
size or representativeness of the labeled information is not
appropriate), the Bayes decision rule suggests to allocate
each observation x to the population which maximizes its
posterior probability πk fk(x). If we assume the densities fk to
be Gaussian, we obtain parametric rules such as linear
(LDA) and quadratic (QDA) discriminant analysis, for
common variance among classes and general covariance
structure, respectively. On the other hand, without any prior
knowledge about the distribution of the data we can estimate
non-parametrically the unknown class conditional densities
from the training dataset. Moreover, to reduce such a
challenging task to the product of univariate density
estimation we apply PCA or ICA transforms to the original
multivariate data before kernel estimation [10].
For this study, two nonparametric and two parametric
discriminant analysis methods for classifying TASI
radiances and emissivities images have been considered: (a)
LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis), assuming Gaussian
functions for the class conditional densities with common
variance among classes; (b) QDA (Quadratic Discriminant
Analysis), assuming again Gaussian density functions but
with general covariance; (c) PCDA (Principal Component
Discriminant Analysis), where the original components are
transformed into principal components prior to
nonparametric density estimation; (d) ICDA (Independent
component discriminant analysis), where the original
components are transformed into independent components
prior to nonparametric density estimation.
Finally, to realize a good trade-off between classification
accuracy and computational effort, reducing data
redundancy, we have investigated a progressive inclusion of
the bands in the classification analysis and estimate their
effectiveness in classifying the data, with the main objective
of quantitatively assessing their role in the overall accuracy.
In particular, we consider a “simple forward” strategy,
where the first band is selected by an exhaustive search over
all N bands as the one that gives the best classification
performance on the training dataset and each of the other
bands is recursively selected by the same criterion among all
the remaining bands.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
We reported results of two experiments. In the first one,
we use as a training dataset the entire validation dataset and
evaluate the classification performance on the same dataset,
while in the second experiment we randomly split the
validation dataset in two parts that we use as training and
validation dataset, respectively. In particular, two different
numerical experiments have been conducted in order to
evaluate the accuracy of the classification methods and
robustness with respect to the training dataset: (a) a training
dataset has been defined starting from the ground validation
and classification has been performed on the whole dataset
through the band selection procedure previously discussed
and performance indicators evaluated for the same training
set; (b) to assess the performance of the proposed
procedures on external datasets, the experimental validation
dataset has been randomly splitted into two parts, and, then,
the first subset is used as a training dataset, whereas
performance indicators are evaluated on the second one. In
order to be not sensitive to the particular random realization
of the training dataset, the experiment is repeated 20 times
with different random choices of the partitioning, and the
results are averaged.
Results of the assessment of the role of the different
spectral bands in reaching classification accuracy showed
for both the radiance and the emissivity datasets that the
three most informative bands for all methods were identified
as 23-25 (10463 nm – 10682 nm), 12 (9259 nm), 1-2 (8054
nm-8164 nm). However, in contrast with our previous
results on classification of VNIR images [10], where a few
spectral bands sufficed to reach good classification
accuracy, on this dataset almost every band bring a not
negligible improvement to the overall result. Then we
proceeded to classify the entire training set (Experiment
(a)). Table 1 shows classification accuracies as the observed
percentage of correctly classified pixels for each class and
for the whole volume of data for the considered methods
(ICDA results are not shown since they do not improve on
PCDA results, mainly because of the different class sizes).
It is evident that PCDA outperforms the parametric
methods, both on the radiance and emissivity data; however,
it is also clear that, while radiance data lead to a higher
success percentage in general, emissivity data allow to a
better discrimination of certain classes. This is the reason
why we decided to apply the classification algorithms on a
merged dataset, comprising the best spectral bands of both
datasets, as chosen by the band selection procedure.
Furthermore, a reasonable explanation of this is that we used
both radiance and emissivity datasets for classification
considering that the temperature, in homogeneous solar
illumination conditions as for this study, depends on the
interactions light-materials also in the VNIR spectral range,
thus facilitating to discriminate different materials occurring
in a scene. Of course this method has to be applied
independently for each thermal image and depends on the
environmental condition thus limiting the use of spectral
libraries for classification.
In particular, the last three columns of Table 1 show
classification results in this case, with significant accuracy
improvement on every class. The worst performance on
class #5 is due not only to the small size of the training
dataset but mainly to the high spectral similarity of this class
to the more populated class #7; in this case the more robust
QDA procedure gave the best results.
Finally we tested the robustness of the proposed
procedures by considering different training and test
datasets, as described in the setup of experiment (b).
Results confirm the general trend of the procedures, with
a slight loss in accuracy.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The TASI-600 imagery results to be an advanced and
suitable remote sensing tool providing excellent quality
airborne thermal multispectral imagery to the science
community involved in the Earth’s environment.
Preliminary results of application of TASI-600 data for
land cover classification, here reported, are very promising
and suggest a more thorough investigation.
These high spectral and spatial resolution airborne
thermal data can be also applied for properly identifying
science/application data products to be derived from next
generation multi/hyperspectral satellite data such as
HyspIRI (launch of the Hyperspectral Infrared Imager
feasible for NASA on 2015) or LDCM (NASA's Landsat
Data Continuity Mission successfully launched on 11
February, 2013) in view of a correct and updated Earth’s
surface composition mapping for the sustainable
management of natural resources.
Table 1. Size of the training set and performance indicators for
the LDA, QDA, PCDA methods applied to the radiance, emissivity
and merged data set: agreement percentage S for the eleven
classes and for the entire training set.
Figure 1. Example of TASI-600 orthorectified radiances (R-11230
nm; G-9587 nm; B-8493 nm) and emissivities (R-8493 nm; G-9587
nm; B-11230 nm) imagery acquired over a rural area in Belgium
on June 2010 with the sensor mounted on the Partenavia P68
Observer airborne.
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