THE MODIFIED UNSUPERVISED SPECTRAL ANGLE CLASSIFICATION (MUSAC) OF HYPERION, HYPERION-FLASSH AND ETM+ DATA USING UNIT VECTOR

Unsupervised spectral angle classification (USAC) is the algorithm that can extract ground object information with the minimum 'Spectral Angle' operation on behalf of 'Spectral Euclidian Distance' in the clustering process. In this study, our algorithm uses the unit vector instead of the spectral distance to compute the mean of cluster in the unsupervised classification. The proposed algorithm (MUSAC) is applied to the Hyperion and ETM+ data and the results are compared with K-Meails and former USAC algorithm (FUSAC). USAC is capable of clearly classifying water and dark forest area and produces more accurate results than K-Means. Atmospheric correction for more accurate results was adapted on the Hyperion data (Hyperion-FLAASH) but the results did not have any effect on the accuracy. Thus we anticipate that the 'Spectral Angle' can be one of the most accurate classifiers of not only multispectral images but also hyperspectral images. Furthermore the cluster unit vector can be an efficient technique for determination of each cluster mean in the USAC.