Statistical separability of spectral classes of blighted corn
A study was conducted to determine the statistical separability of multispectral measurements from corn having varying levels of southern corn leaf blight severity. Multispectral scanner data in twelve spectral channels in the wavelength range 0.4 to 11.7 microns were analyzed for ten selected flightlines of the 1971 Corn Blight Watch Experiment. A total of 168 corn fields having 18,804 sample points were analyzed. The blight rating information for these fields was available from ground observations. Maximum average transformed divergence between spectral classes of all possible pairs of blight levels, maximized over a subset of channels, was computed in each of one, two, three, and four spectral channels for each of ten flightlines. From the statistical analysis of the values of average transformed divergence, it was concluded that the greater the difference between the blight levels, the more statistically separable they are.