The state-of-the-art of airborne laser systems for oil mapping

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been an increasing interest in merging data acquired simultaneously by lidar and hyperspectral sensors. There are two major reasons for this interest. First, a laser works as an artificial light source that expands the operating range of optical remote sensing systems. Second, a hyperspectral detector is adjusted to specific spectral feature(s) of the scene due to the operating wavelength(s) of the laser light source. This simplified approach allows us to ignore extra information coming from, a passive hyperspectral sensor and therefore greatly speeds up the decision-making process. This study was motivated by the absence of sufficient information about active optical remote sensing means in the literature, which is widely used in remote sensing education and image interpretation. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of airborne laser systems for oil mapping. © 2007 CASI.