Sediment grain size estimation using airborne remote sensing, field sampling, and robust statistic

Remote sensing has been used since the 1980s to study parameters in relation with coastal zones. It was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that it started to acquire imagery with good temporal and spectral resolution. This has encouraged the development of reliable imagery acquisition systems that consider remote sensing as a water management tool. Nevertheless, the spatial resolution that it provides is not adapted to carry out coastal studies. This article introduces a new methodology for estimating the most fundamental physical property of intertidal sediment, the grain size, in coastal zones. The study combines hyperspectral information (CASI-2 flight), robust statistic, and simultaneous field work (chemical and radiometric sampling), performed over Santander Bay, Spain. Field data acquisition was used to build a spectral library in order to study different atmospheric correction algorithms for CASI-2 data and to develop algorithms to estimate grain size in an estuary. Two robust estimation techniques (MVE and MCD multivariate M-estimators of location and scale) were applied to CASI-2 imagery, and the results showed that robust adjustments give acceptable and meaningful algorithms. These adjustments have given the following R(2) estimated results: 0.93 in the case of sandy loam contribution, 0.94 for the silty loam, and 0.67 for clay loam. The robust statistic is a powerful tool for large dataset.