Remote Sensing

Practical 1: Introduction to ENVI

Aims and objectives

The aim of this practical is to introduce you to ENVI and the basics of digital image display.

Core Tasks:
1. Viewing the image data
2. Playing around the image data
3. Displaying colour composites
4. Image Enquiry
5. Viewing metadata of image

At the end of this practical you should be familiar with some of the basic working of ENVI and
with the nature and form of remote sensing image data.

Image used in this practical

Figure 1: Characteristics of image used

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Getting started with ENVI
1. Before getting started with ENVI, copy the image data from practical1 folder to your
personal working folder.
Starting ENVI
1. Start ENVI by clicking start, scroll up to ENVI 5.1/ENVI. The main menu appears as:

Figure 2: ENVI main menu

Introducing the data

The image file you will be working with is a subset of a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper
(ETM) image of Charleston USA. The file contains the 7 Landsat & ETM bands. It is easier to
visualize the structure of the image files if you think of each file being composed of a stack of
separate images.

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Information Box
Unless image data is converted to reflectance, pixel brightness values in an image are represented
by digital numbers which ranges from 0 to one less than a selected power of 2 (e.g. 0 to 255). The
maximum number of brightness levels available depends upon the number of bits used in
representing the energy recorded by a sensor. Thus, if a sensor used 8 bits to record the data, there
would be 256 digital number values available ranging from 0 to 255. However, if only 4 bits were
used, then only 16 values ranging from 0 to 15 would be available. If 2 bits were used, then there
would be even fewer digital value available, which is equal to 4 values. A 1-bit images would have
only 2 values.
Image data are generally displayed in a range of grey tone, with black representing a digital number
of 0 and white representing the maximum value (for example, 255 in 8-bit data. By comparing a
2-bit image with an 8-bit image, we can see that there is a large difference in the level of detail and
contrast depending on their radiometric resolutions.

Figure 3: Visualization of same image in different bit representation

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Task 1: Setting Preferences
1. Click on File > Preference > Directories.
2. In input and output directory, navigate to your working directory.

Task 2: Image Display- Loading Grayscale Image

1. Select file/open image file. Data file name selection dialog box appears.
2. Navigate to your working directory where you put your data and select the file
Charleston_tm_19940203 from the list and click open. You can see the layer manager that
the image is loaded, and you can see the loaded image is band 1.
3. In map view, you may not see the full image. To see the full image, right click on the image
and click on zoom to full extent. Now you can see the full image in map view.
4. To visualize the image in different band, right click on image and click on change RGB
bands. The change band dialog box appears on your screen. Choose the band you want to
visualize and click ok. You can see the name of band you selected at the layer manager and
you can visualize the change in image viewer.

Figure 4: Change band dialog box

5. Display the image with different band and see the difference.

Task 3: Roaming around an image in ENVI

Prepare: Display band 4 of the Charleston image in the main image window (if not already
displayed).
1. You can play around the image by using the bar below the main bar as in figure.

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Zooming: You can zoom in and zoom out the image in different way using the zoom toolbar.

You can use this zoom toolbar to zoom image in certain extent defined by the mouse cursor.

Zoom in the image in certain extent defined by the software

Zoom out the image in certain extent defined by the software

Zoom in the full extent

Zoom in and out the image by numerical ratio

Panning:

You can pan the image in different direction and different amount as defined by the mouse
cursor.

Practice: You can load band 6 into the display and do the same as band 4.

Question 1:
You will see a difference between band 6 and all the other bands. Why does band 6 look
different.

Question 2:
Which of the seven available bands provides most information about the sea bed and why?

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Task 4: Displaying Color Composites
In this section we will explore the display of color composite image. Color composite images let
us view the reflectance information from three separate bands in a single image.
A. Displaying a True Color Image
1. Click on the data manager at the left side of window below the main menu bar. The
data manager dialog box appears.

Figure 5: Data Manager toolbar

2. Click on the band selection. Click on red ribbon and then click on the band 3 in the
image in upper part of the dialog box. Similarly, click on green ribbon and click on the
band 2. Finally, click on blue ribbon and then click on the band 1.
3. Click on load data to load the image into a new display.
In this image, we have used ETM band 3, 2 and 1 (red, green and blue) and we have created
a natural color composite in which blue brightness information is displayed with blue light
phosphors in the computer display, green brightness information with green light
phosphors and red brightness information with red light phosphors. Our interpretation of
the spectral response patterns underlying the particular colors we see in the composted is
therefore quite intuitive. However, any combination of bands may be used and assigned to
the 3 light phosphors- the choice depends on the particular application and the information
contents of the band.

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 B. Displaying a standard False Color Composite
1. Create a new composite image using the same procedure as before, except this time in
the available bands list, assign band 4 to Red (R), band 3 to Green (G) and band 2 to
Blue (B). This is what is known as a standard false color composite.

Question 3:
Why does vegetation appear red in the images in false color composite?

Question 4:
Why is the deep sea dark blue and shallow water cyan in color?

Question 5:
Is it possible to create a true color composite of SPOT HRV data?

(note: You will have to do some additional reading to answer question 5)

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Task 5: Image Enquiry
Displaying the cursor location and value
Sometimes it is necessary to determine the coordinates and brightness values of specific pixels in
the displayed image.
You can query a displayed image for information about each pixel using cursor hair and cursor
value.

1. Click on (Cursor Location) to display the location and value of each pixel defined by
mouse cursor.

Figure 6: Cursor Value of location in an image

2. To specify the exact location of pixel, you can use Cursor hair .
You can define the value of the image in certain location by using the combination of two tools.
This combination gives main image display number, cursor position, and the actual data value of
the pixel underneath the crosshair cursor.
You can move the cross hair cursor in the viewer by dragging the white crosshair over the image.
3. Collect values for bands 1-5 and 7 for 5 to 6 representative pixels in each of the following
cover types: (a) Urban, (b) Water, (c) Upland Vegetation (dry).
• Because ENVI will only allow you to view 3 bands at a time you will need to open
2 displays. The first containing bands 1,2,3 and the second image containing bands
4,5,7. To do this:
• Close all existing images. Open data manager and assign band 1 to red, band 2 to
green and band 3 to blue and click on load data.

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 • Again, in data manager, assign band 4 to red, band 5 to green and band 7 to blue
and tick on open in new view and click on load data.
• Click on view > Link View. Link view dialog box appears.
• Tick on Geolink and click link all. Click OK.
Now, take pan tool and pan on of the image. You can see that other image in image view is moving
accordingly. Now take cursor value tool. In the cursor value box, you can see the coordinate and
pixel value of the all bands simultaneously.
You should note these values down to enable you to complete the next exercise.

Figure 7: Link View toolbar to link two image

Question 6:
Using the values noted from above, complete the graphs in the answer book provided. Use
the “x” axis for the TM bands and the “y” axis for the brightness values. Remember to label
your graphs as Urban, Water and Upland vegetation and remember to label both axes. Think
about how you display the range of values in each band and the variation of these values.
Remember that data from the individual ETM+ bands are discrete not continuous. You
should consider how discrete data are represented graphically before drawing your graphs.

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 The graphs you have drawn are basic spectral response patterns. You should recall from
the lectures that different cover types reflect different amounts of energy in different
wavelengths.

Question 7:
Briefly describe and explain how the spectral response patterns differ for each of the land
covers.

Task 6: Viewing metadata of the image

1. Right click on the image in layer manager menu and click on view metadata. Observe the
several aspect of image metadata such as raster types, coordinate system, extents, spectral
properties, time of acquisitions etc.

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Question 7:
Write the complete information of the metadata of the given image.

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