1987 Volume 7 Issue 4 Pages 347-355_2
Sophisticated spaceborne images with high spatial resolution and stereoscopic viewing capability have been available for photogeological applications since the SPOT Satellite-1 was launched in 1986.
In these applications, the preliminary stage of onshore exploration for non-renewable resources requires users to select the most appropriate spaceborne image to minimize the exploration cost and to find the most promising field. From this viewpoint, it is necessary to quantitatively evaluate the practical quality of the available images.
This paper describes the results obtained through the comparative study on the assessment of the spatial resolution and effectiveness of the stereoscopic viewing capability of Landsat and SPOT images of the same scale, covering identical areas in the Yerington area, Nevada. The study mainly involves photo-interpretation of the relative drainage density which seems to be directly related to the limits of the terrain feature extraction.
The visual interpretation revealed that the extracted drainage density from SPOT images was much higher than that from Landsat TM images because of higher spatial resolution and stereoscopic viewing capability. So far as SPOT images on a basic scale of 1 : 200, 000 are concerned, the interpretation led to the conclusion that multispectral images did not differ much from panchromatic images within the practical limits of interpretation.
Considering geological and geomorphological information obtained in this study area, it is concluded that the SPOT multispectral image is, at present, the most appropriate for visual photogeological interpretation.
