Seafloor and Land Cover Classification Through Airborne Lidar and Hyperspectral Data Fusion

In 2007 the Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX) collected concurrent bathymetric lidar and hyperspectral imagery in Hilo Bay, Hawaii. The data were collected using the Compact Hydrographic Airborne Rapid Total Survey (CHARTS) system. CHARTS is JALBTCX in-house survey capability that includes a SHOALS-3000 lidar instrument integrated with a CASI-1500 hyperspectral imager. CHARTS collects either 20-kHz topographic lidar data and 3-kHz bathymetric lidar data, each concurrent with digital RGB and hyperspectral imagery. Optech International´s Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA) Processor is designed to integrate the bathymetric lidar and hyperspectral data streams, creating a product suite that includes maps of water depth, bottom reflectance, water column volume reflectance, a+b_b (a measure of water column attenuation) derived from the bathymetric lidar data, spectral color-balanced mosaics of seafloor reflectance, spectral water column parameters, and seafloor and landcover classifications This paper will demonstrate the capability of Optech REA on the production dataset from Hilo Bay.