Mountain Top Removal: Analyze Week

This week is a continuation of Mountain Top Removal. The main objective for this week was to Reclassify an MTR raster. To accomplish this, we used a Landsat image and manipulated it using ERDAS Imagine. I also learned about SkyTruth, a non-profit organization that provides  remote sensing and digital mapping technology using satellite images and other visual technologies, to provide information and data to environmental advocates, the media, and the public.  

My task was to examine a digital multispectral image that represents a portion of our study area. Additionally, this week we signed up for small groups. I am in Group 3 and we have two Landsat images to work with:

LT50190332010243EDC00.tar

LT50190342010243EDC00.tar

Using ArcMap I was able to use the Training Sample Manager to sample various polygons from the image and classify them as MTR or NonMTR. This could be a tedious task but I found it mildly entertaining.  I created the following histograms and scatter plots to check the accuracy of my sampling:

 

Looks pretty good to me. After this, I used ERDAS Imagine to create an AOI layer and then use the "Grow tool" to select pixels that were in an MTR area. Conducting this analysis took time for many of the tools to process the data. Once again, this was a fun exercise even though I had to wait patiently between each step of processing data to arrive at my final product that I then exported back to ArcMap to complete.  Below is my final re-classified MTR image