Bridging the resource management to heavy iron gap: Integrated airborne multispectral remote sensing

For most resource management remote sensing applications, overall project costs are of critical importance. Budgets made available to individual researchers seldom permit experiments using an airborne multispectral remote sensing system. The integrated multispectral system described in this paper has a capital cost of approximately $50,000 and can be operated in most light aircraft that can provide a small (20cm) camera port. In addition to having low capital and operational casts the system is compact and light weight (approximately 20 kg). This provides the potential for a low cost airborne RS system that can be made project dedicated. Based upon operational experience, weather and ground conditions can seldom be precisely predicted and a project dedicated system will permit considerable planning and execution flexibility, since flight rescheduling and multiple imaging flights are often necessary to provide suitable data. An example of such an integrated law cost airborne multispectral remote sensing system is described. It consists of: 1. Two motor driven 35mm or 70mm reconnaissance cameras using colour and colour Infrared film. 2. Three optically filtered (including removable internal IR cut off filters), electronically shuttered CCD progressive scan cameras integrated into an airborne direct digital recording system using an PC processor with extended RAM, a 32bit four channel digitizing card and 100mb portable disk data storage. 3. Two CCD based imaging spectrometers providing approximately 10nm bandwidth spectral data across the CCD spectrum (400nm to 1000nm).