Standards for Airborne Hyperspectral Image Data

A key activity of the FP7/EUFAR project (http://www.eufar.net) is providing transnational access to different infrastructures for airborne research. The variety of aircraft and instruments for airborne measurements and the huge number of institutions involved in the EUFAR project introduces a heterogeneous pool of data and many different ways of handling the processes involved in airborne measurements. Therefore, there is a need to introduce standards and best practices within EUFAR to ensure integration and interoperability. Thus, the main goal of EUFAR’s Networking Activity “Standards and Protocols” is to develop these standards and best practices to ensure harmonization, integration and interoperability, to assist new/inexperienced users and to enable easier exchange and comparison of data. For airborne hyperspectral remote sensing, common protocols have been agreed upon for flight campaign planning, metadata and data distribution and cataloguing. The existing specifications for metadata within the INSPIRE regulations have been implemented and expanded with additional metadata for quality indicators which were requested by EUFAR’s Joint Research Activity “HYQUAPRO”. In this paper, the current recommendations of the Networking Activity “Standards and Protocols” will be described, with a special emphasis on the metadata and data structure for airborne hyperspectral data. For this purpose, an INSPIRE and ISO 19115 conforming example based on the metadata file as implemented at DLR’s archiving system DSDA (Deutsches SatellitenDaten Archiv) is shown. In addition, hyperspectral image data with all corresponding files (e.g. quality layers and metadata) is organised using the possibilities of HDF5. * Corresponding author. [email protected]