Lineament extraction from Landsat TM, JERS-1 SAR, and DEM for geological applications

The Hough transform is an efficient numerical method for extracting lineaments or linear features from 2-D geological and geophysical data, including satellite images. Analysis of lineaments has also been widely carried out in geological research, and Landsat TM data have been used most extensively for geological lineament investigations. However, there has been less geological application research carried out in the lineament extraction from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. This research has tested several spatial data including Landsat TM, JERS-1 SAR and DEM data for automatic geological lineament analyses. The Hough transform technique is applied here for the extraction of lineaments from preprocessed binary spatial data. The multiresolution method is tested to extract lineaments efficiently, because geological lineaments usually appear in various length scales. The Kyungsang Basin in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula was selected as the test site in this research. The lineaments are extracted from JERS-1 SAR, Landsat TM, and DEM data using both manual and the automatic Hough transform method. The results of lineament extraction indicate that the predominant direction is the NNE direction of azimuth angle 0°-30°, and the second dominant directions are the NNW, NE, and WNW directions. The results obtained in this research agree well with the regional trends and also with the local geological maps.