Mapping hydrothermal alteration minerals using high-resolution AVIRIS-NG hyperspectral data in the Hutti-Maski gold deposit area, India

The present study exploits high-resolution hyperspectral imagery acquired by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) sensor from the Hutti-Maski gold deposit area, India, to map hydrothermal alteration minerals. The study area is a volcanic-dominated late Archean greenstone belt that hosts major gold mineralization in the Eastern Dharwar Craton of southern India. The study encompasses pre-processing, spectral and spatial image reduction using Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF) and Fast Pixel Purity Index (FPPI), followed by endmember extraction using n-dimensional visualizer and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) mineral spectral library. Image derived endmembers such as goethite, chlorite, chlorite at the mine site (chlorite mixed with mined materials), kaolinite, and muscovite were subsequently used in spectral mapping methods such as Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Spectral Information Divergence (SID) and its hybrid, i.e. SIDSAM(tan). Spectral similarity matrix of the target and non-target-based method has been proposed to find the possible optimum threshold needed to obtain mineral map using spectral mapping methods. Relative Spectral Discrimination Power (RSDPW) and Confusion Matrix (CM) have been used to evaluate the performance of SAM, SID, and SIDSAM(tan). The RSDPW and CM illustrate that the SIDSAM(tan) benefits from the unique characteristics of SAM and SID to achieve better discrimination capability. The Overall Accuracy (OA) and kappa coefficient (kappa) of SAM, SID, and SIDSAM(tan) were computed using 900 random validation points and obtained 90% (OA) and 0.88 (kappa), 91.4% and 0.90, and 94.4% and 0.93, respectively. Obtained mineral map demonstrates that the northern portion of the area mainly consists of muscovite whereas the southern part is marked by chlorite, goethite, muscovite and kaolinite, indicating the propylitic alteration. Most of these minerals are associated with altered metavolcanic rocks and migmatite.