Optical Earth remote sensing sensors record the reflected solar radiation in multiple discrete spectral channels, producing a spectral signature for each picture element in a remote sensing image. The amount of reflected energy depends on the physical and chemical nature and status of the object's surface and is a function of the scanned wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectral information that is saved in different data layers can be treated separately (e.g., by displaying a single channel on the screen), or it can be combined in different ways, widely referred to as spectral transformations.

Any transformation of a multispectral data set generates a new image or a set of data channels with the overall aim of maximizing the information content and at the same time ...