SPATIAL RESOLUTION ASSESSMENT OF THE TELOPS AIRBORNE TIR IMAGERY

Abstract. Having a high spatial resolution of Thermal InfraRed (TIR) Sensors is a challenge in remote sensing applications. Airborne high spatial resolution TIR is a novel source of data that became available lately. Recent developments in spatial resolution of the TIR sensors have been an interesting topic for scientists. TIR sensors are very sensitive to the energies emitted from objects. Past researches have been shown that increasing the spatial resolution of an airborne image will decrease the spectral content of the data and will reduce the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). Therefore, in this paper a comprehensive assessment is adapted to estimate an appropriate spatial resolution of the TIR data (TELOPS TIR data), in consideration of the SNR. So, firstly, a low-pass filter is applied on TIR data and the achieved products fed to a classification method for analysing of the accuracy improvement. The obtained results show that, there is no significant change in classification accuracy by applying low-pass filter. Furthermore, estimation of the appropriate spatial resolution of the TIR data is evaluated for obtaining higher spectral content and SNR. For this purpose, different resolutions of the TIR data are created and fed to the maximum likelihood classification method separately. The results illustrated in the case of using images with ground pixel size four times greater than the original image, the classification accuracy is not reduced. Also, SNR and spectral contents are improved. But the corners sharpening is declined.