Utilization of ASTER Data and Spectral Analysis to Discriminate Hydrothermally Altered Areas over Rabor, South of Kerman, Iran

This study attempts to evaluate the capability of the advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer (ASTER) and the advantages of ground knowledge for generating maps portraying hydrothermally altered areas in relation to porphyry copper deposits. The northern part of the Rabor area in the Urumieh-Dokhtar magmatic belt, containing some copper mineralization occurrences, was investigated as a case study. Several image processing techniques, namely minimum noise fraction, pixel purity index, and n-dimensional visualization, contributed to the extraction of pure pixels as endmembers. The spectra of some rock samples collected around the well-known altered zones of the study area were resampled to ASTER bands and used to identify the image-extracted endmembers. Spectral analysis of the endmembers and ground sample spectra led to the identification of three types of hydrothermal alterations: (1) phyllic, (2) propylitic, and (3) argillic. The identified endmembers were used as the specified targets for mapping hydrothermal alteration zones over the study area by using a mixture tuned match filtering algorithm. Results demonstrate that high abundances within pixels correspond closely to the altered areas. Field observations, thin section, and X-ray diffraction of collected samples confirmed the accuracy of the alteration maps prepared by the application of the proposed methods. The final classified hydrothermal alteration maps showed the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient values of 85.41 and 0.72%, respectively. These results ascertain that ASTER data that use suitable image processing techniques appear consistent in mapping out the distribution of hydrothermally altered areas. In addition, ground knowledge data can act as a valuable information source to increase the image classification accuracy and reliability.