Comparison of Unmixing Results Derived from Aviris, High and Low Resolution, and Hydice Images at Cuprite, Nv

The availability of low-altitude, high-spatial-resolution AVIRIS (Green et al, 1998) images and high-resolution HYDICE (Basedow et al, 1995) images over Cuprite, Nevada has provided an unprecedented opportunity to compare the radiometric quality, the ability to detect end-members and the application of matched filters to three different data sets in an area that is well-understood mineralogically. An earlier paper (Goetz and Kindel, 1996) compared high-altitude AVIRIS and HYDICE data and showed that, even though there was a 36:1 ratio in pixel area, no new end-members appeared in the HYDICE images that were not seen in the lower resolution AVIRIS data. This result was not surprising in light of the fact that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the HYDICE data was much lower than that of AVIRIS. In this study, it was possible to remove the uncertainty associated with differing SNR’s because the same AVIRIS sensor was used to acquire both high-resolution and low-resolution images.