Current Status of Hyperspectral Remote Sensing: Principle, Data Processing Techniques, and Applications

Hyperspectral images have emerged as a new and promising remote sensing data that can overcome the limitations of existing optical image data. This study was designed to provide a comprehensive review on definition, data processing methods, and applications of hyperspectral data. Various types of airborne, spaceborne, and field hyperspectral image sensors were surveyed from the available literatures and internet search. To understand the current status of hyperspectral remote sensing technology and research development, we collected several hundreds research papers from international journals (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, International Journal of Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing of Environment and AVIRIS Workshop Proceedings), and categorized them by sensor types, data processing techniques, and applications. Although several hyperspectral sensors have been developing, AVIRIS has been a primary data source that the most hyperspectral remote sensing researches were relied on. Since hyperspectral data have very large data volume with many spectral bands, several data processing techniques that are particularly oriented to hyperspectral data have been developed. Although atmospheric correction, spectral mixture analysis, and spectral feature extraction are among those processing techniques, they are still in experimental stage and need further refinement until the fully operational adaptation. Geology and mineral exploration were major application in early stage of hyperspectral sensing because of the distinct spectral features of rock and minerals that could be easily observed with hyperspectral data. The applications of hyperspectral sensing have been expanding to vegetation, water resources, and military areas where the multispectral sensing was not very effective to extract necessary information.