Abstract

The infrared radiation reflected and emitted from a planetary surface is rich in diagnostic information about the surface of the body and the atmosphere through which the radiation passes. Infrared spectroscopy is, therefore, a useful tool in the remote sensing of both the earth and planets. With the emergence of large-format IR detector arrays, it has become feasible to acquire spatially resolved spectra that can be displayed in image format. The result of this technique—imaging spectroscopy—can be illustrated by the data cube shown in Fig. 1. We can represent the imaging spectrometry data as a geometrically registered set of spatial images, each acquired at a distinct wavelength. The spectrum corresponding to any resolved feature within an image can be retrieved by extracting the corresponding samples from each of the multispectral images in the set.

© 1988 Optical Society of America