Objective procedures for lineament enhancement and extraction

A longterm research goal at EROS Data Center is to develop automated, objective procedures for lineament mapping. In support of this goal, a five-step digital convolution procedure has been used to produce directionally enhanced images, which contain few artifacts and little noise. The main limitation of this procedure is that little enhancement of lineaments occurs in dissected terrain, in shadowed areas, and in flat areas with a uniform land cover. The directional enhancement procedure can be modified to extract edge and line segments from an image. Any of various decision rules can then be used to connect the line segments and to produce a final lineament map. The result is an interpretive map, but one that is based on an objective extraction of lineament components by digital processing. -from Authors