Lithological mapping of East Tianshan area using integrated data fused by Chinese GF-1 PAN and ASTER multi-spectral data

The East Tianshan Mountain is one of the most important gold ore forming zones in northwestern China and central Asia. The Chinese GaoFen-1 (GF-1), the first Chinese high resolution satellite, is characterized by its 2-m resolution PAN data. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), the well-known earth observation satellite, is advanced by its finer spectral resolution owing 9 bands in the visible and near infrared (VNIR) to the short-wave infrared (SWIR) region. In this study, we fused the GF-1 PAN and the ASTER multispectral data using the well-known Gram-Schmidt Pan Sharpening (G-S) method to produce a new data with both high spatial and spectral resolution. Then different lithological units were mapped respectively using the fusion data, the ASTER data and the WorldView-3 data by support vector machine (SVM) method. In order to assess this fusion data, a comparison work was executed among the three mapping results. The comparison work indicated that lithological classification using the new fusion data is an efficient, robust and low cost method, and it could replace the WV-3 data in some large sale geological work.