Spectral identification of materials by reflectance spectral library search

Spectral library search is emerging as a viable approach for material identification and mapping by reusing spectral knowledge gained from hyperspectral remote sensing across space and time. The potential of retrieving meaningful spectral material identifications in the presence of reflectance of spectra of various material types and with various similarity metrics has been assessed in this study. Test reflectance spectra of various vegetation, minerals, soils and urban material types are identified by searching through the composite reflectance spectral library obtained by combining various institutional reflectance spectral libraries. The accuracy of material identifications under various conditions: (i) in the presence of identical, similar and dissimilar spectra; (ii) in the presence of only identical and dissimilar spectra; and (iii) in the presence of only dissimilar spectra has been assessed with several similarity metrics. Results indicate the possibility of obtaining 100% accurate material identifications by library search if the spectral library contains identical spectra. However, the presence of a large number of similar spectra, despite the presence of identical spectra, is found to increase false positives, thereby reducing the accuracy of retrievals to 82% at best. Further, the accuracy of material identifications in the presence of similar spectra is similarity metric-dependent and varied from about 52% (obtained from Binary Encoding) to 82% (obtained from Normalized Spectral Similarity Score). Overall, results support the possibility of using independent reflectance spectral libraries for material identification while calling for robust spectral similarity metrics.