While uncrewed aerial vehicles are routinely used as platforms for hyperspectral sensors, their application is mostly confined to nadir imaging orientations. Oblique hyperspectral imaging has been impeded by the absence of robust registration and correction protocols, which are essential to extract accurate information. These corrections are especially important for detecting the typically small spectral features produced by minerals, and for infrared data acquired using pushbroom sensors. The complex movements of unstable platforms (such as UAVs) require rigorous geometric and radiometric corrections, especially in the rugged terrain often encountered for geological applications. In this contribution we propose a novel correction methodology, and associated toolbox, dedicated to the accurate production of hyperspectral data acquired by UAVs, without any restriction concerning view angles or target geometry. We make these codes freely available to the community, and thus hope to trigger an increasing usage of hyperspectral data in Earth sciences, and demonstrate them with the production of, to our knowledge, the first fully corrected oblique SWIR drone-survey. This covers a vertical cliff in the Dolomites (Italy), and allowed us to distinguish distinct calcitic and dolomitic carbonate units, map the qualitative abundance of clay/mica minerals, and thus characterise seismic scale facies architecture.

Optical hyperspectral cameras capture the spectral reflectance of materials. Since many materials behave as heterogeneous intimate mixtures with which each photon interacts differently, the relationship between spectral reflectance and material composition is very complex. Quantitative validation of spectral unmixing algorithms requires high-quality ground truth fractional abundance data, which are very difficult to obtain. In this work, we generated a comprehensive laboratory ground truth dataset of intimately mixed mineral powders. For this, five clay powders (Kaolin, Roof clay, Red clay, mixed clay, and Calcium hydroxide) were mixed homogeneously to prepare 325 samples of 60 binary, 150 ternary, 100 quaternary, and 15 quinary mixtures. Thirteen different hyperspectral sensors have been used to acquire the reflectance spectra of these mixtures in the visible, near, short, mid, and long-wavelength infrared regions (350-15385) nm. Overlaps in wavelength regions due to the operational ranges of each sensor and variations in acquisition conditions resulted in a large amount of spectral variability. Ground truth composition is given by construction, but to verify that the generated samples are sufficiently homogeneous, XRD and XRF elemental analysis is performed. We believe these data will be beneficial for validating advanced methods for nonlinear unmixing and material composition estimation, including studying spectral variability and training supervised unmixing approaches. The datasets can be downloaded from the following link: https://github.com/VisionlabHyperspectral/Multisensor_datasets.

Accurate estimation of the fractional abundances of intimately mixed materials from spectral reflectances is generally hard due to a highly nonlinear relationship between the measured spectrum and the composition of the material. Changes in the acquisition and the illumination conditions cause variability in the spectral reflectance, further complicating the spectral unmixing procedure. In this work, we propose a methodology for unmixing intimate mixtures that can tackle both nonlinearity and spectral variability. A supervised approach is proposed that characterizes the nonlinear data manifolds by high-dimensional Bézier surfaces. To deal with spectral variability, a manifold transformation procedure is designed. To generate Bézier surfaces, training samples are required that are uniformly distributed throughout the data manifold. For this, we recently generated a hyperspectral dataset of intimate mineral powder mixtures by homogeneously mixing five different clay powders (Kaolin, Roof clay, Red clay, mixed clay, and Calcium hydroxide) in laboratory settings. In total 330 samples (325 mixtures and five pure materials) were prepared. The ground fractional abundances of these mixtures uniformly cover the five-dimensional probability simplex. The spectral reflectances of these samples were acquired by multiple sensors with a large variation in sensor types, platforms, and acquisition conditions. Experiments are conducted both on simulated and real intimate mineral powder mixtures. Comparison with a number of unsupervised unmixing methods demonstrates the potential of the proposed approach.

Because of its significant absorption power, especially in the shortwave infrared optical region, water dominates the optical reflectance properties of water-bearing materials. This allows us to study a material's water-related features, such as its moisture content from optical reflectance. In this study, we proposed a framework to estimate soil moisture content from PRISMA hyperspectral remote sensing data. The proposed framework requires a dry endmember spectrum and an endmember spectrum of high soil moisture along with ground-truth moisture content, obtained from ground measurements. The method takes into account the complex interaction of light with soils, the large variation of environmental conditions, leading to spectral variability and the soil-specific behavior of water. The framework is extensively validated using ground-measured soil moisture data from the International Soil Moisture Network database. A total of 1418 PRISMA images corresponding to 151 ground stations were analyzed. From 518 retained images, a total RMSE of 8.682 %, and $R^{2}$ of 0.385 was obtained.