Open-File Report 2010-1076
As part of the Central Colorado Mineral Resource Assessment Project, the digital image data for four Landsat Thematic Mapper scenes covering central Colorado between Wyoming and New Mexico were acquired and band ratios were calculated after masking pixels dominated by vegetation, snow, and terrain shadows. Ratio values were visually enhanced by contrast stretching, revealing only those areas with strong responses (high ratio values). A color-ratio composite mosaic was prepared for the four scenes so that the distribution of potentially hydrothermally altered rocks could be visually evaluated. To provide a more useful input to a Geographic Information System-based mineral resource assessment, the information contained in the color-ratio composite raster image mosaic was converted to vector-based polygons after thresholding to isolate the strongest ratio responses and spatial filtering to reduce vector complexity and isolate the largest occurrences of potentially hydrothermally altered rocks. |
First posted May 14, 2010
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Knepper, D.H., Jr., 2010, Distribution of potential hydrothermally altered rocks in central Colorado derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper data: A geographic information system data set: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2010-1076, 14 p.
Abstract
Introduction
Image Processing and Interpretation
Filtering and Conversion to Vector Polygons
Characteristics of Potential Alteration Shapefile (TM_potential_alteration.shp)
References Cited