Development of an Airborne Radiative Transfer Spectral Scanner for a Single-Engine Aircraft

In June 2015, we developed a 2.5th - generation airborne imaging system, the Airborne Radiative Transfer Spectral Scanner for a single-engine aircraft (ARTS-SE) to observe volcanoes. The platform for ARTS-SE is a single-engine Cessna 208 aircraft. ARTS-SE consists of a modified push-broom imaging spectrometer (ARTS) and a newly developed camera system, the Structure and Thermal Information Capture (STIC). The ARTS-SE push-broom imaging spectrometer unit consists of two Sensor Head Units (SHUs). These SHUs cover the wavelengths from 380 to 1,100nm and 8,000 to 11,500nm with 320 bands. STIC consists of four cameras, the two visible cameras and the two thermal-infrared cameras. The STIC specifications provide image data sets for the Structure from Motion (SfM) technique. This study describes the ARTS-SE system specifications and presents some in-flight performance test results obtained from the ARTS-SE instrument overflight of the bundle adjustment site, and the volcano observation flight over an active volcano. The validation results indicate that the geo-correction accuracy is typically within two pixels (RMS) for each ARTS-SE push-broom SHU and that there is good agreement (within 15m) between Digital Map 10m Grid (Elevation) from Geospatial Information Authority of Japan and the measured DSM from STIC's multiple-view images. We conclude that ARTS-SE can be used to observe volcanoes.