Simulation and exploitation of proposed commercial multispectral remote sensing systems

With the increasing number of planned and operational high resolution commercial remote sensing satellites, there is a need to study the utility of the image exploitation products that will be generated by these systems. This has been done in a two-step process of simulating a multispectral testcase image data cube and then applying standard exploitation tools to different bands of the simulated testcase. The first step in evaluating image utility was to use a new image simulation tool to generate a commercial testcase for comparison with several other commercial sensors and their associated spectral specifications. For this study, the simulation capability that was developed used hyperspectral image cube as input to generate a testcase multispectral simulated image cube that was representative of current and planned commercial remote sensing systems. The second step in the utility evaluation was to apply standard multispectral exploitation tools to the testcase imagery that was generated in the first step. This exploitation study used different Landsat Thematic Mapper spectral band combinations with a spatial resolution that was fixed for the testcase that was simulated. The exploitation products created from this testcase were used to show the utility comparison of remote sensing systems with the following band combinations-Landsat 1-5, 7; Landsat 1-4; Landsat 1-3; and Landsat 2-4-at the spatial resolution of the testcase simulation.