An Approach to the Spectral Signature Analysis and Supervised Classification for Forest Damages - An Assessment of Low Altitued Airborne MSS Data -

This paper discusses the capabilities of airborne remotely sensed data to detect and classify forest damades. In this work the AMS (Aircraft Multiband Scanner) was used to obtain digital imagery at 300m altitude for forest damage inventory in the Black Forest of Germany. MSS(Multispectral Scanner) digital numbers were converted to spectral emittance and radiance values in 8 spectral bands from the visible to the thermal infrared and submitted to a maximum-likelihood classification for : (1) tree species ; and. (2) damage classes. As expected, the resulted, the results of MSS data with high spatial resolution 0.75m$\times$0.75m enabled the detection and identification of single trees with different damages and were nearly equivalent to the truth information of ground checked data.