Traditional airborne environmental monitoring has frequently deployed hyperspectral imaging as a leading tool for characterizing and analyzing a scene’s critical spectrum-based signatures for applications in agriculture genomics and crop health, vegetation and mineral monitoring, and hazardous material detection. As the acceptance of hyperspectral evaluation grows in the airborne community, there has been a dramatic trend in moving the technology from use on midsize aircraft to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). The use of UAS accomplishes a number of goals including the reduction in cost to run multiple seasonal evaluations over smaller but highly valuable land-areas, the ability to use frequent data collections to make rapid decisions on land management, and the improvement of spatial resolution by flying at lower altitudes (<500 ft.). Despite this trend, there are several key parameters affecting the use of traditional hyperspectral instruments in UAS with payloads less than 10 lbs. where size, weight and power (SWAP) are critical to how high and how far a given UAS can fly. Additionally, on many of the light-weight UAS, users are frequently trying to capture data from one or more instruments to augment the hyperspectral data collection, thus reducing the amount of SWAP available to the hyperspectral instrumentation. The following manuscript will provide an analysis on a newly-developed miniaturized hyperspectral imaging platform, the Nano-Hyperspec®, which provides full hyperspectral resolution and traditional hyperspectral capabilities without sacrificing performance to accommodate the decreasing SWAP of smaller and smaller UAS platforms. The analysis will examine the Nano-Hyperspec flown in several UAS airborne environments and the correlation of the systems data with LiDAR and other GIS datasets.
Traditional airborne environmental monitoring has frequently deployed hyperspectral imaging as a leading tool for
characterizing and analyzing a scene’s critical spectrum-based signatures for applications in agriculture genomics and
crop health, vegetation and mineral monitoring, and hazardous material detection. As the acceptance of hyperspectral
evaluation grows in the airborne community, there has been a dramatic trend in moving the technology from use on midsize
aircraft to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). The use of UAS accomplishes a number of goals including the
reduction in cost to run multiple seasonal evaluations over smaller but highly valuable land-areas, the ability to use
frequent data collections to make rapid decisions on land management, and the improvement of spatial resolution by
flying at lower altitudes (< 150 m).
Despite this trend, there are several key parameters affecting the use of traditional hyperspectral instruments in UAS
with payloads less than 0.5 kg (~1lb) where size, weight and power (SWaP) are critical to how high and how far a given
UAS can fly. Additionally, on many of the light-weight UAS, users are frequently trying to capture data from one or
more instruments to augment the hyperspectral data collection, thus reducing the amount of SWaP available to the
hyperspectral instrumentation.
The following manuscript will provide an analysis on a newly-developed miniaturized hyperspectral imaging platform
that provides full hyperspectral resolution and traditional hyperspectral capabilities without sacrificing performance to
accommodate the decreasing SWaP of smaller and smaller UAS platforms.
The design and optical performance of a small-footprint, low-power, turnkey, Point-And-Stare hyperspectral analyzer,
capable of fully automated field deployment in remote and harsh environments, is described. The unit is packaged for
outdoor operation in an IP56 protected air-conditioned enclosure and includes a mechanically ruggedized fully reflective,
aberration-corrected hyperspectral VNIR (400-1000 nm) spectrometer with a board-level detector optimized for point
and stare operation, an on-board computer capable of full system data-acquisition and control, and a fully functioning
internal hyperspectral calibration system for in-situ system spectral calibration and verification. Performance data on the
unit under extremes of real-time survey operation and high spatial and high spectral resolution will be discussed.
Hyperspectral acquisition including full parameter tracking is achieved by the addition of a fiber-optic based
downwelling spectral channel for solar illumination tracking during hyperspectral acquisition and the use of other
sensors for spatial and directional tracking to pinpoint view location. The system is mounted on a Pan-And-Tilt device,
automatically controlled from the analyzer's on-board computer, making the HyperspecTM particularly adaptable for base
security, border protection and remote deployments. A hyperspectral macro library has been developed to control
hyperspectral image acquisition, system calibration and scene location control. The software allows the system to be
operated in a fully automatic mode or under direct operator control through a GigE interface.
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