Radiometric Correction and 3D Integration of Long-Range Ground-based Hyperspectral Imagery for Mineral Exploration of Vertical Outcrops

Recently, ground-based hyperspectral imaging has come to the fore, supporting the arduous task of mapping near-vertical, difficult-to-access geological outcrops. The application of outcrop sensing within a range of one to several hundred meters, including geometric corrections and integration with accurate terrestrial laser scanning models, is already developing rapidly. However, there are only very few studies dealing with ground-based imaging of distant (i.e., in the range of several kilometres) targets such as mountain ridges, cliffs, and pit walls. In particular the extreme influence of atmospheric effects and topography-induced illumination differences have remained an unmet challenge on the spectral data. Those effects cannot be corrected by means of common correction tools for nadir satellite- or airborne data. Thus, this article presents an adapted workflow to overcome the challenges of long-range outcrop sensing, including straightforward atmospheric and topographic corrections. Using two datasets with different characteristics, we demonstrate the application of the workflow and highlight the importance of the presented corrections for a reliable geological interpretation. The achieved spectral mapping products are integrated with 3D photogrammetric data to create large-scale now-called “hyperclouds”, i.e. geometrically correct representations of the hyperspectral datacube. The presented workflow opens up a new range of application possibilities of hyperspectral imagery by significantly enlarging the scale of ground-based measurements.