A Twelve-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 as 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 cameras and a computer equipped with a single multichannel digitizing board. The system cameras are equipped with various narrowband (6.5–12.6 nm bandwidths) interference filters to acquire images within the visible/near-infrared (NIR) (400–1000 nm) spectral waveband. The ADVIS multichannel capturing board is capable of obtaining 12 analog video inputs that are readily converted into digital images having 640 by 480 pixels resolution. The digitizing board has four RGB banks which have the capability of generating four synchronized real-time false color composite images from any selectable three-band combination among the 12 cameras, as keyed by the RGB inputs of the digitizing board. The computer system has a two GB storage capacity hard drive that can store 2000 RGB 24-bit color images. The system is unique because the quad real-time color composite imagery it provides is of adequate quality for assessing scenes of interest and there is no need for post-processing band registration immediately after the flight mission in order to evaluate the imagery. Also, the display of the quad images readily depicts which composite image(s) provides better differences among land-use cover types in the scene. This imagery, however, needs to be registered for 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 composites and to qualitatively understand the interaction of ecological parameters with the electromagnetic spectrum. The ADVIS multispectral image acquisition may determine the best band(s) for characterizing and/or detecting problems of the various natural resources.