Data assessment for agricultural monitoring applications

The first Earth Observing System(EOS) satellite called Terra was launched in 1999. ASTER is one of the five state-of-the-art instrument sensor systems on-board Terra with 3 bands of 15m spatial resolution in the visible near-infrared wavelength regions. These three bands have the same spectral zones as Landsat7 ETM. ASTER data will be more and more used to monitoring agriculture for low price in the future. This paper tests the performance of ASTER data in the aspects of geometric correction, typical surface features identification, land target area measurement, image classification and interpretation, taking ETM merged image with pan band and multispectral bands as reference. The results show that ASTER image can be geometrically corrected with high accuracy, and it is better than ETM merged image. ASTER image records the small land targets in detail, which can be more suitable for recognition by eyes, and can be used for measuring land targets area with high accuracy. It has the same good performance as ETM image for image classification and interpretation. In a word, ASTER will be a newer and more important data source for agricultural monitoring applications.