DROACOR^® REFLECTANCE RETRIEVAL FOR HYPERSPECTRAL MINERAL EXPLORATION USING A GROUND-BASED ROTATING PLATFORM

Abstract. The acquisition of imaging spectroscopy data from ground based rotating stages is a novel approach which is more and more used in open pit mines for prospection and controlling. The special radiometric situation of such data sets asks for new processing approaches for geometric processing as well as for reflectance retrieval. Herein, a new method for atmospheric correction and relative reflectance retrieval is presented which is optimized for the special horizontal scanning situation by hyperspectral instruments from rotating ground based platforms. The method is implemented within the recently developed drone atmospheric correction framework DROACOR^®. It combines a physical inversion of a radiative transfer code with semi-empirical correction approaches for illumination and spectral absorption. Sample results from two open pit mines show that mineral detection after reflectance retrieval allows the discrimination of iron minerals and that the retrieved spectra are well comparable to standard library spectra.