Mineralogical Mapping with Accurately Corrected Shortwave Infrared Hyperspectral Data Acquired Obliquely from UAVs

While uncrewed aerial vehicles are routinely used as platforms for hyperspectral sensors, ap-plications are mostly confined to nadir imaging orientations. Oblique hyperspectral imaging has been impeded by the absence of robust registration and correction protocols, which are essential to extract accurate information. These corrections are especially important for detecting the gen-erally small spectral features produced by minerals, and for infrared data acquired using pushbroom sensors. The complex movements of unstable platforms (such as UAVs) require rigor-ous geometric and radiometric corrections, especially in the rugged terrain often encountered for geological applications. In this contribution we propose a novel correction methodology, and as-sociated toolbox, dedicated to the accurate production of hyperspectral data acquired by UAVs, without any restriction concerning view angles or target geometry. We make these codes freely available to the community, and thus hope to trigger an increasing usage of hyperspectral data in Earth sciences, and demonstrate them with the production of, to our knowledge, the first fully corrected oblique SWIR drone-survey. This covers a vertical cliff in the Dolomites (Italy), and al-lowed us to distinguish distinct calcitic and dolomitic carbonate units, map the qualitative abun-dance of clay/mica minerals, and thus characterise seismic scale facies architecture.