11th Pacific (Pan) Ocean Remote Sensing Conference (PORSEC), Kochi, Kerala, India, November 2012 Hyperspatial WorldView-2 Satellite Remote Sensing Data for Polar Geospatial Information Mining of Larsemann Hills, East Antarctica Jawak, S. D., Luis, A. J. and Ravindra R. National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Headland Sada, Vasco-da-Gama, Goa 403804, India
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Keywords: WorldView-2, thematic mapping, topography An endeavor is made under DigitalGlobe’s “8 Band Research challenge” to assess the prospective of very high spatial and spectral resolution Worldview2(WV-2) data for mining of polar geospatial information and thematic elevation mapping of about 100 sqkm area nearby Larsemann Hills where the new Indian Antarctic station “Bharati” is being established. We present the research work carried out using 8-Band WV-2(PAN 0.5m + Multispectral 2m) satellite imagery for better understanding of the spatial changes in the surface topography, including land ice variation, and land cover dynamics which will help in logistic activities in the future Indian Antarctic expeditions. It is the first Indian attempt and one of the very few recent International polar research attempts of thematic land cover mapping of any part of Antarctica using very high resolution remote sensing data. A stereo pair of WV-2 data, acquired on 9th December 2009 and 10th September 2010 by DigitalGlobe, has been used for the analysis, and we are successful in mapping of the study area into 4 major thematic classes namely continental Ice (30.09 km2 ), landmass (12.9 km2), Sea-ice (56.65 km2) and lakes (0.36 km2) along with elevation mapping in the form of DEM with less than 1m vertical RMSE. The thematic classes are identified and extracted by the differences in spectral wavelength and visual interpretation using various wellknown classification approaches. Overall, the research indicates that WV-2 can significantly improve the visual interpretation and the expert classification is a powerful tool in the production of a reliable thematic map of remotest Antarctic region, where aerial photography is difficult due to extreme harsh climatic conditions and high logistic costs. Thematic classification results showed that an overall accuracy of 95.52 % (kappa statistics value 0.9485) from 200 reference ground truth data collected during Indian Scientific expedition to Antarctic, which is considered acceptable or good for optical remote sensing data.
