These days you can't get away with non-quantitative remote sensing. Government and industry now demand very high standards with revegetation work and in the accuracy of monitoring. Ms Ong says the BRDF correction process can be used with both digital cameras and airborne scanners - the two most common remote sensing formats used by the mining industry. If the miners know where the rehabilitation is struggling, they can go back and apply discreet management, thus ensuring there is no unnecessary delay in signing off on the environmental conditions set by government. The process will also be a boon for minerals exploration.
Some vegetation is an indication of particular minerals lying beneath it.
Another promising use for the technique is in giving new value to old aerial survey photographs. The process costs slightly more because of the satellite images and extra computing. Our processing eliminates almost all of the error.