Lithological mapping from hyperspectral data by improved use of spectral angle mapper

The spectral angle mapper (SAM), as a spectral matching method, has been widely used in lithological type identification and mapping using hyperspectral data. The SAM quantifies the spectral similarity between an image pixel spectrum and a reference spectrum with known components. In most existing studies a mean reflectance spectrum has been used as the reference spectrum for a specific lithological class. However, this conventional use of SAM does not take into account the spectral variability, which is an inherent property of many rocks and is further magnified in remote sensing data acquisition process. In this study, two methods of determining reference spectra used in SAM are proposed for the improved lithological mapping. In first method the mean of spectral derivatives was combined with the mean of original spectra, i.e., the mean spectrum and the mean spectral derivative were jointly used in SAM classification, to improve the class separability. The second method is the use of multiple reference spectra in SAM to accommodate the spectral variability. The proposed methods were evaluated in lithological mapping using EO-1 Hyperion hyperspectral data of two arid areas. The spectral variability and separability of the rock types under investigation were also examined and compared using spectral data alone and using both spectral data and first derivatives. The experimental results indicated that spectral variability significantly affected the identification of lithological classes with the conventional SAM method using a mean reference spectrum. The proposed methods achieved significant improvement in the accuracy of lithological mapping, outperforming the conventional use of SAM with a mean spectrum as the reference spectrum, and the matching filtering, a widely used spectral mapping method.