A 12-BAND AIRBORNE DIGITAL VIDEO IMAGING-SYSTEM (ADVIS)

This article describes an airborne digital video imaging system (ADVIS ) and presents multispectral imagery to illustrate its potential use a s a remote sensing research tool. The system was primarily designed to acquire multiband images for ascertaining spectral bands and/or band combinations to better characterize and assess natural resources. The ADVIS is comprised of 12 charge coupled device (CCD) analog video came ras and a computer equipped with a single multichannel digitizing boar d. The system cameras are equipped with various narrowband (6.5-12.6 n m bandwidths) interference filters to acquire images within the visibl e/near-infrared (NIR) (400-1000 nm) spectral waveband. The ADVIS multi channel capturing board is capable of obtaining 12 analog video inputs that are readily converted into digital images having 640 by 480 pixe ls resolution. The digitizing board has four RGB bunks which have the capability of generating four synchronized real-time false color compo site images from any selectable three-band combination among the 12 ca meras, as keyed by the RGB inputs of the digitizing board. The compute r system has a two GB storage capacity hard dl-iue that can store 2000 RGB 24-bit color images. The system is unique because the quad real-t ime color composite imagery It provides is of adequate quality for ass essing scenes of interest and there is no need for post-processing ban d registration immediately after the flight mission in order to evalua te the imagery. Also, the display of the quad images readily depicts w hich composite image(s) provides better differences among land-use cov er types in the scene. This imagery, however, needs to be registered f or image processing and analysis. The display of the black-and-white ( B&W) image components (spectral bands) of the composite images provide basic information to assist in the interpretation of the color compos ites and to qualitatively understand the interaction of ecological par ameters with the electromagnetic spectrum. The ADVIS multispectral ima ge acquisition may determine the best band(s) for characterizing and/o r detecting problems of the various natural resources. (C) Elsevier Sc ience Inc., 1998.