• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.85-97
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• 2001

The KT(Kauth-Thomas) and IHS(Intensity-Hue-Saturation) transformation techniques were introduced and compared to investigate fire-scarred areas with single post-fire Landsat 7 ETM+ image. This study consists of two parts. First, using only geometrically corrected imagery, it was examined whether or not the different level of fire-damaged areas could be detected by simple slicing method within the image enhanced by the IHS transform. As a result, since the spectral distribution of each class on each IHS component was overlaid, the simple slicing method did not seem appropriate for the delineation of the areas of the different level of fire severity. Second, the image rectified by both radiometrically and topographically was enhanced by the KT transformation and the IHS transformation, respectively. Then, the images were classified by the maximum likelihood method. The cross-validation was performed for the compensation of relatively small set of ground truth data. The results showed that KT transformation produced better accuracy than IHS transformation. In addition, the KT feature spaces and the spectral distribution of IHS components were analyzed on the graph. This study has shown that, as for the detection of the different level of fire severity, the KT transformation reflects the ground physical conditions better than the IHS transformation.