APPLICATION OF REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES ON ASTER DATA FOR ALTERATION ZONES EXTRACTION AND LITHOLOGICAL MAPPING OF ELFAWAKHIR – EL-SID AREA, CENTRAL EASTERN DESERT, EGYPT: AN APPROACH FOR GOLD EXPLORATION

Abstract

Remote sensing images are widely used in many geological applications; in our research we used remote sensing techniques for lithological mapping and mineral exploration through extracting the alteration zones with integration of lineaments density in the study area. For lithological mapping; False Color Composite (FCC), Color Ratio Composites (CRC) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) techniques were used. To extract the alteration zones; Spectral ratio indices, Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM) and spectral signature based supervised classification techniques named Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Spectral Information Divergence (SID) have been applied on ASTER data. At last, the final alteration map is integrated with lineament density map and the locations of the old gold mines in the area for introducing the probable potential areas for gold exploration.