Evaluation of Thematic Mapper bands - A first step in feature selection

It is pointed out that the Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat-D will produce more than 10 times the data than the present Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS) because of its increased dimensionality (7 bands) and improved ground resolution (30 m). However, the impact upon image analysis can be reduced by analyzing a subset of the data and thus reducing the dimensionality. A study is made to identify these possible subsets. The correlation between the reflectance factors of nine common crop types and one soil type in the first six TM spectral bands is determined. In similar fashion, the correlations between the Landsat MSS bands are calculated as a test of the available data set and procedure.