Hyperspectral sensor systems data sources for enhanced analysis
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
SEARCH · Engineering Papers
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
The Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer aboard Terra calibration and validation team at JPL employs a suite of ground based radiance measurements to derive multi-angle TOA radiance predictions.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Spaceborne sensors like NASA's Hyperion hyperspectral imager generate huge data volumes, and several near-term trends indicate that data volumes will only increase. Next-generation hyperspectral missions, such as NASA's Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI), will operate at higher duty cycles and higher data rates, and their users will expect products to be generated from the data in near real time [1]. Barring a sudden advance in satellite downlink capacity, these trends point to a need to process data and generate products onboard the spacecraft. Rather than downlink an entire hyperspectral image cube, onboard processing enables satellites to downlink partial or completed scientific data products, which are often one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the original image. In addition, a satellite with onboard data processing resources and direct broadcast transmission equipment could send data products directly to first responders, research scientists or other users on the ground. Next-generation space-capable data processors will have a combination of reconfigurable gate arrays, digital signal processors and general-purpose CPUs. Correctly programmed and configured, these resources are sufficient to run sophisticated data analysis programs, including hyperspectral image processing algorithms that commonly run on desktop computers [2]. This paper describes how we implemented one such program, the HSEG hierarchical image segmentation algorithm, software commonly used on desktop and parallel processors, on a hardware platform designed to mimic a next-generation space-capable data processor [3]. We also describe our approach to porting the algorithm to and optimizing it for the new platform, and determine the expected performance gains enabled by our design. This extended abstract will describe the HSEG algorithm and hardware platform in greater detail, provide an analysis of the key function within the algorithm that required hardware acceleration, and describe our implementation of that function in hardware.
Harmful algal blooms (HABs) in Lake Erie have been prominent in recent years. The bloom in 2014 reached a severe level causing the State of Ohio to declare a state of emergency. At that time NASA Glenn Research Center was requested by stakeholders to help monitor the blooms in Lake Erie. Glenn conducted flights twice a week in August and September and assembled and distributed the HAB information to the shoreline water resource managers using its hyperspectral imaging sensor (in development since 2006), the S3 Viking aircraft, and funding resources from the NASA Headquarters Earth Science Division. Since then, the State of Ohio, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have elevated their funding and activities for observing, monitoring, and addressing the root cause of HABs. Also, the communities and stakeholders have persistently requested NASA Glenns participation in HAB observation. Abundant field campaigns and sample analyses have been funded by Ohio and NOAA, which provided a great opportunity for NASA to advance science and airborne hyperspectral remote sensing economically. Capitalizing on this opportunity to advance the science of algal blooms and remote sensing, NASA Glenn conducted the Airborne Hyperspectral Observation of harmful algal blooms campaign in 2015 that was, in many respects, twice as large as the 2014 campaign. Focusing mostly on Lake Erie, but also including other small inland lakes and the Ohio River, the campaign was conducted in partnership with a large number of partners specializing in marine science and remote sensing. Airborne hyperspectral observation of HABs holds promise to distinguish potential HABs from nuisance blooms, determine their concentrations, and delineate their movement in an augmented spatial and temporal resolution and under cloudsall of which are excellent complements to satellite observations. Working with collaborators at several Ohio and Michigan institutions as well as one in South Dakota and one in Alabama, this effort was able to provide next-day georeferenced estimates of cyanobacteria and scum concentrations. Very prompt processing and analysis of the hyperspectral imagery is necessary for the information to be acted upon. For example, a next-day report of an overflight over the Ohio River indicated that a bloom could be present as far downstream as the Cincinnati intake, but the Ohio EPA had not received visual reports of a bloom that far downstream. Water samples were obtained at the Cincinnati water intake, based on the flight data, and detected microcystins in the source water. The flight data helped State and municipal authorities realize the potential extent of that bloom, and triggered response sampling, before the visual river-wide scums started forming. The present document describes the process that was utilized to take raw remote sensing data and create information products; this includes system calibration and validation, efforts to correct atmospheric effects, and algorithms that produce the data products. Furthermore, successful research into improved algorithms for expanding the capability to delineate in water constituents is included. Finally, comparisons that show expected relationships between ground-based measurements and hyperspectral imager version 2 (HSI2) data results are presented, giving confidence in the remote sensing products.
An introduction to some of the potential uses of hyperspectral data for ecosystem analysis is presented. The examples given are derived from a digital dataset acquired over a sub-boreal forest in central Maine in 1990 by the NASA-JPL Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instrument gathers data from 400 to 2500 nm in 224 channels at bandwidths of approximately 10 nm. As a preview to the uses of the hyperspectral data, several products from this dataset were extracted. They range from the traditional false color composite made from simulated Thematic Mapper bands and the well known normalized difference vegetation index to much more exotic products such as fractions of vegetation, soil and shade based on linear spectral mixing models and estimates of the leaf water content at the landscape level derived using spectrum-matching techniques. Our research and that of many others indicates that the hyperspectral datasets carry much important information which is only beginning to be understood. This analysis gives an initial indication of the utility of hyperspectral data. Much work still remains to be done in algorithm development and in understanding the physics behind the complex information signal carried in the hyperspectral datasets. This work must be carried out to provide the fullest science support for high spectral resolution data to be acquired by many of the instruments to be launched as part of the Earth Observing System program in the mid-1990's.
Cell abundances of Prochlorococcus, Synechococcus, and autotrophic picoeukaryotes were estimated in surface waters using principal component analysis (PCA) of hyperspectral and multispectral remote-sensing reflectance data. This involved the development of models that employed multilinear correlations between cell abundances across the Atlantic Ocean and a combination of PCA scores and sea surface temperatures. The models retrieve high Prochlorococcus abundances in the Equatorial Convergence Zone and show their numerical dominance in oceanic gyres, with decreases in Prochlorococcus abundances towards temperate waters where Synechococcus flourishes, and an emergence of picoeukaryotes in temperate waters. Fine-scale in-situ sampling across ocean fronts provided a large dynamic range of measurements for the training dataset, which resulted in the successful detection of fine-scale Synechococcus patches. Satellite implementation of the models showed good performance (R(exp 2) > 0.50) when validated against in-situ data from six Atlantic Meridional Transect cruises. The improved relative performance of the hyperspectral models highlights the importance of future high spectral resolution satellite instruments, such as the NASA PACE mission’s Ocean Color Instrument, to extend our spatiotemporal knowledge about ecologically relevant phytoplankton assemblages.
Nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) is an important trace-gas pollutant and climate agent whose presence also leads to spectral interference in ocean color retrievals. NO 2 column densities have been retrieved with satellite UV–Vis spectrometers such as the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) that typically have spectral resolutions of the order of 0.5 nm or better and spatial footprints as small as 3.6 km × 5.6 km. These NO 2 observations are used to estimate emissions, monitor pollution trends, and study effects on human health. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to retrieve NO 2 amounts with lower-spectral-resolution hyperspectral imagers such as the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) that will fly on the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite set for launch in early 2024. OCI will have a spectral resolution of 5 nm and a spatial resolution of ∼ 1 km with global coverage in 1–2 d. At this spectral resolution, small-scale spectral structure from NO 2 absorption is still present. We use real spectra from the OMI to simulate OCI spectra that are in turn used to estimate NO 2 slant column densities (SCDs) with an artificial neural network (NN) trained on target OMI retrievals. While we obtain good results with no noise added to the OCI simulated spectra, we find that the expected instrumental noise substantially degrades the OCI NO 2 retrievals. Nevertheless, the NO 2 information from OCI may be of value for ocean color retrievals. OCI retrievals can also be temporally averaged over timescales of the order of months to reduce noise and provide higher-spatial-resolution maps that may be useful for downscaling lower-spatial-resolution data provided by instruments such as OMI and TROPOMI; this downscaling could potentially enable higher-resolution emissions estimates and be useful for other applications. In addition, we show that NNs that use coefficients of leading modes of a principal component analysis of radiance spectra as inputs appear to enable noise reduction in NO 2 retrievals. Once trained, NNs can also substantially speed up NO 2 spectral fitting algorithms as applied to OMI, TROPOMI, and similar instruments that are flying or will soon fly in geostationary orbit.
Synthetic Eigen Vectors (EV) used for the statistical analysis of the PC reconstruction residual of large ensembles of data are a novel tool for the analysis of data from hyperspectral infrared sounders like the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the EOS Aqua and the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) on the SUOMI polar orbiting satellites. Unlike empirical EV, which are derived from the observed spectra, the synthetic EV are derived from a large ensemble of spectra which are calculated assuming that, given a state of the atmosphere, the spectra created by the instrument can be accurately calculated. The synthetic EV are then used to reconstruct the observed spectra. The analysis of the differences between the observed spectra and the reconstructed spectra for Simultaneous Nadir Overpasses of tropical oceans reveals unexpected differences at the more than 200 mK level under relatively clear conditions, particularly in the mid-wave water vapor channels of CrIS. The repeatability of these differences using independently trained SEV and results from different years appears to rule out inconsistencies in the radiative transfer algorithm or the data simulation. The reasons for these discrepancies are under evaluation.
This NASA grant was funded as a result of an unsolicited proposal submission to Kennedy Space Center. The proposal proposed the development and testing of a shallow water optical water quality buoy. The buoy is meant to work in shallow aquatic systems (ponds, rivers, lagoons, and semi-enclosed water areas where strong wind wave action is not a major environmental During the project period of three years, a demonstration of the buoy was conducted. The last demonstration during the project period was held in November, 1996 when the buoy was demonstrated as being totally operational with no tethered communications line. During the last year of the project the buoy was made to be solar operated by large gel cell batteries. Fund limitations did not permit the batteries in metal enclosures as hoped for higher wind conditions, however the system used to date has worked continuously for in- situ operation of over 18 months continuous deployment. The system needs to have maintenance and somewhat continuous operational attention since various components have limited lifetime ages. For example, within the last six months the onboard computer has had to be repaired as it did approximately 6 months after deployment. The spectrograph had to be repaired and costs for repairs was covered by KB Science since no ftmds were available for this purpose after the grant expired. Most recently the computer web page server failed and it is currently being repaired by KB Science. In addition, the cell phone operation is currently being ftmded by Dr. Bostater in order to maintain the system's operation. The above points need to be made to allow NASA to understand that like any sophisticated measuring system in a lab or in the field, necessary funding and maintenance is needed to insure the system's operational state and to obtain quality factor. The proposal stated that the project was based upon the integration of a proprietary and confidential sensor and probe design that was developed by KB Science and Engineering and is currently patented by KB Science. The buoy's purpose was to collected hyperspectral optical signatures for analysis and resulting estimation of water quality parameters such as chlorophyll-a, seston and dissolved organic matter (DOC). The ultimate goal of the project was to develop a buoy that would integrate a probe to measure upwelling light from a source and thus relate this backscattered light to water quality parameters.
We describe a new algorithm to retrieve SO2 from satellite-measured hyperspectral radiances. We employ the principal component analysis technique in regions with no significant SO2 to capture radiance variability caused by both physical processes (e.g., Rayleigh and Raman scattering and ozone absorption) and measurement artifacts. We use the resulting principal components and SO2 Jacobians calculated with a radiative transfer model to directly estimate SO2 vertical column density in one step. Application to the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) radiance spectra in 310.5-340 nm demonstrates that this approach can greatly reduce biases in the operational OMI product and decrease the noise by a factor of 2, providing greater sensitivity to anthropogenic emissions. The new algorithm is fast, eliminates the need for instrument-specific radiance correction schemes, and can be easily adapted to other sensors. These attributes make it a promising technique for producing longterm, consistent SO2 records for air quality and climate research.
Retrievals of ocean color properties from space are important for monitoring the health of the ocean ecosystem but such retrievals can be limited spatially due to conditions such as clouds, aerosols, and sun glint. Gap filling of ocean color retrievals is typically performed by combining retrievals from multiple satellites or temporally averaging multiple days of retrievals. Despite these techniques large gaps still exist posing challenges for near real time monitoring of events like harmful algae blooms. To address these limitations, we developed a spatial gap filling approach applying machine learning approach to hyperspectral instruments to learn how to perform an atmospheric correction under challenging retrieval conditions. In this approach a principal component analysis is used to decompose the hyperspectral measurements into spectral components that describe the scattering and absorption of the atmosphere mixed with the surface spectral signatures. The coefficients of the principal components are used to train a neural network to predict ocean color properties derived from a standard MODIS ocean color algorithm. We apply the approach to two hyperspectral UV/VIS sensors, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) to show that it can be used to estimate ocean color properties such as chlorophyll, remote sensing reflectance, and fluorescence line height. This method could be used as a gap-filling technique for the future Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) onboard upcoming NASA's Plankton, Aerosol Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite to provide additional information for monitoring the health of our global oceans. Additionally, it could be applied to the first NASA and Smithsonian geostationary Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) spectrometer to better understand diurnal variability in inland and coastal ocean ecology.
In response to the ongoing global food crisis, the United Nations has identified “Zero Hunger” as one of its Sustainable Development Goals. A central contributor to the crisis is the process in which agricultural lands go through desertification. Research has shown a direct correlation between soil salinity and desertification - increased salinity levels indicate a higher risk for desertification. Furthermore, researchers have explored various techniques to map soil salinity, but these methods are oftentimes inefficient and don’t address future salinity predictions. To improve desertification monitoring, soil salinity can be observed via hyperspectral imaging on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to predict the risk of agricultural desertification using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques. A significant gap exists in past research that applies ML and imaging techniques to soil salinity: convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and regression models are rarely leveraged together, despite the efficiency and accuracy of these models. To compensate for this gap, the proposed system leverages the use of these AI and ML models to improve soil assessment and prediction techniques. This approach involves three steps - data collection, image analysis, and future prediction. Using hyperspectral cameras on UAVs to collect the data from the region, a trained CNN model will output estimated soil salinity levels at a specific time. The estimations will then be analyzed by a regression model to assess the accuracy of future soil salinity predictions. The proposed system will identify regions at risk of desertification to help farmers mitigate agricultural loss, in turn helping alleviate the food crisis.
Spaceflight and planetary exploration place severe constraints on the available bandwidth for downlinking large hyperspectral images. In addition, communications with spacecraft often occur intermittently, so mission-relevant hyperspectral data must wait for analysis on the ground before it can inform spacecraft activity planning. Onboard endmember detection can help alleviate these problems. It enables novelty detection and target identification for scheduling follow-up activities such as additional observation by narrow field of view instruments. Additionally, endmember analysis can facilitate data summary for downlink. This work describes a planned experiment of selective downlink by the EO-1 autonomous spacecraft. Here an efficient superpixel endmember detection algorithm keeps to the limited computational constraints of the flight processor. Tests suggest the procedure could enable significant improvements in downlink efficiency.
In the fall of 1998, MacMillan Hall opened at Brown University to students. In MacMillan Hall was the new Computer Learning Center, since named the EarthLab which was outfitted with high-end workstations and peripherals primarily focused on the use of remotely sensed and other spatial data in the environmental sciences. The NASA grant we received as part of the "Centers of Excellence in Applications of Remote Sensing to Regional and Global Integrated Environmental Assessments" was the primary source of funds to outfit this learning and research center. Since opening, we have expanded the range of learning and research opportunities and integrated a cross-campus network of disciplines who have come together to learn and use spatial data of all kinds. The EarthLab also forms a core of undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research on environmental problems that draw upon the unique perspective of remotely sensed data. Over the last two years, the Earthlab has been a center for research on the environmental impact of water resource use in and regions, impact of the green revolution on forest cover in India, the design of forest preserves in Vietnam, and detailed assessments of the utility of thermal and hyperspectral data for water quality analysis. It has also been used extensively for local environmental activities, in particular studies on the impact of lead on the health of urban children in Rhode Island. Finally, the EarthLab has also served as a key educational and analysis center for activities related to the Brown University Affiliated Research Center that is devoted to transferring university research to the private sector.
The launch of the NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) and the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) satellite sensors will provide increased spectral resolution compared to existing platforms. These new sensors will require robust calibration and validation datasets, but existing field-based instrumentation is limited in its availability and potential for geographic coverage, particularly for coastal and inland waters, where optical complexity is substantially greater than in the open ocean. The minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an important metric for assessing the reliability of derived biogeochemical products and their subsequent use as proxies, such as for biomass, in aquatic systems. The SNR can provide insight into whether legacy sensors can be used for algorithm development as well as calibration and validation activities for next-generation platforms. We extend our previous evaluation of SNR and associated uncertainties for representative coastal and inland targets to include the imaging sensors PRISM and AVIRIS-NG, the airborne-deployed C-AIR radiometers, and the shipboard HydroRad and HyperSAS radiometers, which were not included in the original analysis. Nearly all the assessed hyperspectral sensors fail to meet proposed criteria for SNR or uncertainty in remote sensing reflectance (R rs ) for some part of the spectrum, with the most common failures (>20% uncertainty) below 400 nm, but all the sensors were below the proposed 17.5% uncertainty for derived chlorophyll-a. Instrument suites for both in-water and airborne platforms that are capable of exceeding all the proposed thresholds for SNR and R rs uncertainty are commercially available. Thus, there is a straightforward path to obtaining calibration and validation data for current and next-generation sensors, but the availability of suitable high spectral resolution sensors is limited.
Recent autonomy experiments conducted on Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) using the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE) flight software has been used to classify key features in hyperspectral images captured by EO-1. Furthermore, analysis is performed by this software onboard EO-1 and then used to modify the operational plan without interaction from the ground. This paper will outline the overall operations concept and provide some details and examples of the onboard science processing, science analysis, and replanning.
Development of methods to identify the physical and chemical character of materials on the earth's surface is one of the foci of hyperspectral remote sensing activities. Enhancing the ability to elucidate changes in foliar chemistry that relate to the health of a plant is a benefit to plant physiologists, foresters, and plant ecologists, as well as geologist and environmental scientists. Vegetation covers the landscape throughout the temperate and tropical regions of the earth. The existence of vegetation in these areas presents special problems to remote sensing systems since geologic bedrock and alteration zones are masked. At times, however, alterations in the soil/sediment geochemical environment result in foliar chemical changes that are detectable via remote sensing. Examples include monitoring of chlorophyll reflectance/fluorescence and equivalent water thickness indices as indicators of drought-induced plant stress. Another processing and interpretation approach used with hyperspectral data has been principal components analysis (PCA). Rowan et al. used PCA to identify absorption feature patterns obtained from vegetated areas with discrete bedrock geology or mineralization as the substrate. Many researchers highlight the need to advance our ability for hyperspectral imaging in vegetated areas as a near-term priority.