Hyperspectral Image Generation, Processing and Analysis

Abstract: Hyperspectral reflectance data are utilised in many applications, where measured data are processed and converted into physical, chemical and/or biological properties of the target objects and/or processes being studied. It has been proven that crop reflectance data can be used to detect, characterise and quantify disease severity and plant density.In this thesis, various methods were proposed and used for detection, characterisation and quantification of disease severity and plant density utilising data acquired by hand-held spectrometers. Following this direction, hyperspectral images provide both spatial and spectral information opening for more efficient analysis.Hence, in this thesis, various surface water quality parameters of inland waters have been monitored using hyperspectral images acquired by airborne systems. After processing the images to obtain ground reflectance data, the analysis was performed using similar methods to those of the previous case. Hence, these methods may also find application in future satellite based hyperspectral imaging systems.However, the large size of these images raises the need for efficient data reduction. Self organising and learning neural networks, that can follow and preserve the topology of the data, have been shown to be efficient for data reduction. More advanced variants of these neural networks, referred to as the weighted neural networks (WNN), were proposed in this thesis, such as the weighted incremental neural network (WINN), which can be used for efficient reduction, mapping and clustering of large high-dimensional data sets, such as hyperspectral images.Finally, the analysis can be reversed to generate spectra from simpler measurements using multiple colour-filter mosaics, as suggested in the thesis. The acquired instantaneous single image, including the mosaic effects, is demosaicked to generate a multi-band image that can finally be transformed into a hyperspectral image.