Landsat image data quality studies

The July 1982 launch of Landsat-4 was immediately followed by a two-year comprehensive set of detailed investigations sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The Landsat Image Data Quality Analysis (LIDQA) research plans for these investigations were specified prior to launch, so that minimum time would be lost in assessing the performance of the long-awaited Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor that Landsat-4 carried in addition to a fourth Multispectral Scanner (MSS). The LIDQA investigations have been substantially completed, and have shown that the TM is a very good spaceborne multispectral radiometer, and has met or exceeded most of its design goals. TM's new short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral capability yielded improved mineral and plant discrimination compared to the MSS, as anticipated by ground-based and airborne TM simulations. Moreover, the improved spatial resolution and geometric accuracy of Landsat-4 and the TM have resulted in satellite image maps exceeding 1:100,000 U.S. map accuracy standards. Finally, based on an information entropy measure, principal component analysis, and classification results, TM data has been shown to approach its theoretical limit in information content per pixel, exceeding the MSS by at least a factor of two.