Data Fusion Using Ihs Transformations for Exploring Ore Deposits in Northeastern Part of the Saharan Metacraton

The main objective of the remotely sensed data fusion is to create an integrated composite image of improved information and enhanced interpretability. This data have geospatial details about earth’s surface for substantial assessment of land resources and mineral exploration. Fusion of Visible-Infrared (VIR) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images provides complementary data to increase the amount of information that can be extracted from the individual input images. It contains the details beneath the surface cover of the respective SAR data while maintaining the basic color content of the original VIR data. Image fusion can be performed at three different processing levels which are pixel level, feature level and decision level according to the stage at which the fusion takes place. In this work, a pixel based image fusion from different sensors, namely Landsat TM and RADARSAT-1 was performed using the Intensity, Hue, and Saturation (IHS) transformations procedures. The northeastern part of the Saharan Metacraton is dominated by medium to high-grade gneisses and migmatites, disrupted by belts of low-grade volcano-sedimentary sequences representing arc assemblages and highly dismembered ophiolites and intruded by a-type granitoids. Banded Iron Formation (BIF) and gold mineralization are associated with the high grade gneisses and migmatites. According to the fusion results, the fused image have enhanced subsurface structures such as foliation, faults and folding that control mineralization of several deposits and reveals the fluvial features which are not observable in Landsat TM images.