Understanding the Unique Spectral Signature of Winter Rape

Driven by significant technological developments in the hyperspectral imaging, material mapping using reference spectra has received renewed interest of the remote sensing community. The applicability of reference spectral signatures in image classification depends mainly on the material type and its spectral signature behaviour. Identification and spectral characterization of materials which exhibit unique spectral behaviour is the first step in this approach. Consequently there have been active researches for the identification of surface materials which exhibit unique spectral signatures. The uniqueness of reflectance signature of winter rape relative to its co-occurring crop species was reported in this study. Reflectance spectral libraries constructed from field spectral reflectance measurements collected over five agricultural crops (alfalfa, winter barley, winter rape, winter rye, and winter wheat) during four subsequent growing seasons were classified by the linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Further, the reference field spectral database was used for the spectral feature fitting and classification of a historical HyMAP airborne hyperspectral imagery acquired at a separate site, by spectral library search. Results indicate the existence of a meaningful spectral matching between image and field spectra for winter rape and demonstrate the potential for transferring spectral library for hyperspectral image classification. The observed consistency in the discrimination of winter rape demonstrates experimentally the fundamental principle of remote sensing which suggests the theoretical existence of unique spectral signatures for materials which can be incorporated as reference spectral signatures for hyperspectral image classification.