A Novel and Open-Source Illumination Correction for Hyperspectral Digital Outcrop Models

The widespread application of drones and associated miniaturization of imaging sensors has led to an explosion of remote sensing applications with very high spatial and spectral resolutions. The 3-D ultrahigh-resolution digital outcrop models created using drones and oblique imagery from ground-based sensors are now commonly used in the academic and industrial sectors, while the generation of spatially accurate models has been greatly facilitated by the development of computer vision tools, such as structure from motion, and the correction of spectral attributes to achieve material reflectance measurements remains challenging. Following the development of a topographical correction toolbox (mephysto), we now propose a series of new tools that can leverage the detailed geometry captured by digital outcrop models to correct for illumination effects caused by oblique viewing angles and the interaction of light with complex 3-D surfaces. This open-source code is integrated into hylite, a python toolbox for the full 3-D processing and fusion of digital outcrop models with hyperspectral imaging data. We validate the performance of our novel method using a case study at an open-pit mine in Tharsis, Spain, and demonstrate the importance of accurate illumination corrections for quantitative spectral analyses. Significantly, we show that commonly applied spectral analysis techniques can yield erroneous results for data corrected using current state-of-the-art approaches. Our proposed method ameliorates many of the issues with these established approaches.