An Analysis Task Comparison of Uncorrected vs. Geo-registered Airborne Hyperspectral Imagery

Geo-registration is the task of assigning geospatial coordinates to the pixels of an image and placing them in a geographic coordinate system. However, the process of geo-registration can impair the quality of the image. This paper studies this topic by applying a comparison methodology to uncorrected and geo-registered airborne hyperspectral images obtained from the RIT SHARE 2012 data set. The uncorrected image was analyzed directly as collected by the sensor without being treated, while the geo-registered image was corrected using the nearest neighbor resampling approach. A comparison of performance was done for the analysis tasks of spectral unmixing and subpixel target detection, which can represent a measure of utility. The comparison demonstrates that the geo-registration process can affect the utility of hyperspectral imagery to a limited extent.