Identification of Effective Wavebands of Aerial Hyperspectral Imagery for Wetland Vegetation Mapping in Fort. Drum Marsh, Florida

Aerial Hyperspectral imaging techniques are considered to be much more accurate due to the high spectral resolutions, but the sensors and relevant techniques require higher cost for the users. The goal of this paper was to identify the most effective wavebands of hyperspectral images for the wetland vegetation mapping. A aerial hyperspectral imaging system with a imager of 64 wavebands ranging from 399.2 nm to 920.5 nm and the pixel size of 1 meter was utilized in Ft. Drum Marsh, Upper St. John´s River Basin, Florida. The Jeffries-Matusita distance was used to calculate the measurement of separability with consideration of reducing wavebands to 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The reduced-waveband images proved successfully in the mapping of wetland vegetation species with above 85%, identical pixels as the generated from the full-waveband image. Therefore, it is suggested to utilize those few effective narrow-length wavebands to build a budget and effective aerial imaging systems for some specific but frequently imaging mission.