J. Earth Syst. Sci.

(2022)131:111  Indian Academy of Sciences

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-01851-y (0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789(
).,-volV)

Automatic extraction and analysis of lineament features

using ASTER and Sentinel 1 SAR data

MRINMOY DHARA1,* , MUNMUN BAISANTRY1 and G PRUSTY2

1
DefenceGeoinformatics Research Establishment, DRDO, Chandigarh 160 036, India.
2
Formerly, Defence Terrain Research Laboratory, DRDO, New Delhi 110 054, Delhi, India.
*Corresponding author. e-mail: mrinmoy0907@gmail.com

MS received 22 September 2020; revised 29 November 2021; accepted 15 December 2021

In recent years, automatic lineament extraction has gained huge popularity as it circumvents the issues
such as errors and time constraints associated with manual extraction procedure. Another impediment in
the lineament extraction process is that linear features existing near sub-surface or occluded due to
vegetation cover cannot be identiBed solely by optical data. To mitigate these issues, a multi-sensor
fusion-based automatic extraction process using EO-based optical and SAR data is proposed. Use of
moderate resolution optical data such as ASTER minimizes erroneous identiBcation and misclassiBcation
of anthropogenic features as geological features. In addition to this, a component loading-based band
selection approach is proposed to select the most informative bands from the available optical bands for
improved extraction of lineament features. Finally, a new HSV-based mapping method for visualization
and directional analysis of the extracted linear features is discussed. The results are validated using the
published seismo-tectonic map of the region and Beld investigation studies which corroborates that the
proposed algorithm can successfully extract most of the geological lineaments in the study area with
minimum errors.
Keywords. Lineament; automatic extraction; optical SAR fusion; component loadings; rose plot; HSV.

1. Introduction application of remote sensing (Masoud and Koike

Since the past few decades, remote sensing has
become an indispensable tool for myriad geological
applications like mineral exploration, landslide
mapping and monitoring as well as structural and
morphological analysis through deformation stud-
ies (Sharma 2012; Sumaryono et al. 2015; Zhang
and Zhou 2017). With the aid of information
available from multitude of sensors, researchers
and analysts can save a lot of their time and eAorts
expended to automate the extraction of lineaments
to complement the extensive Beld-based geological
investigation. Study of lineament features in terms
of their orientation and kinematics is an important
2006; Dasgupta and Mukherjee 2019; Javhar et al.
2019).
Lineaments can be deBned as naturally occurring
linear features on the earth surface, either geo-
morphic or tonal, formed due to tectonic or vol-
canic activities. They are the terrain surface
expression of fractures, joints and other linear
geological phenomena that occur anywhere, from
the terrain surface down to possibly great depths
(Prost 2013). Thus, directional analysis and map-
ping of lineament features become imperative in
evaluating the tectonic history of the continental
area as well as zones of structural weakness (Ald-
harab et al. 2018).
111 Page 2 of 15
Determination and analysis of lineaments is a
challenging task that requires careful inspection
and intervention from experienced analysts and
geologists. The extracted lineaments should be
carefully and contextually studied and should be
discriminable from other non-geological features.
The identiBcation of lineaments is generally per-
formed using manual delineation by domain
experts, analysts and photo-interpreters using
enhanced satellite imageries. Such procedures are
inefBcient and time-consuming and the resulting
maps can be subjective (Cross and Wadge 1988). A
more objective approach than manual delineation
is the automatic extraction of lineaments using
standard image processing algorithms.
Standard edge detection Blters like Canny
(Canny 1986), Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG)
(Kong et al. 2013), image transformation methods
like band ratioing, principal component analysis,
hough transform, etc., and segmentation methods
are some of the techniques employed for automatic
lineament extraction. For better results, these
methods are often preceded by preprocessing
techniques like contrast enhancement, noise
removal and conversion into more suitable colour
spaces like IHS, Lab, etc. Most of the aforemen-
tioned methods use optical images as input, but are
incapacitated by many limitations and inconsis-
tencies. For instance, optical images demonstrate
poor performance in the detection of outcrop or
geological lineaments in areas of vegetation
(Mwaniki et al. 2015) or even, sparse vegetation.
However, microwave sensors exhibit better detec-
tion capabilities than optical sensors under these
conditions.
However, the potential of optical sensors cannot
be completely dissuaded since the changes in veg-
etation patterns may provide hints on the presence
of lineaments (Abbate et al. 2006; Boyer and
McQueen 1964). Several researchers (Kowalik and
Glenn 1987; Mussakowski et al. 1991) have pursued
this problem through coherent assimilation of data
from multiple sources such as microwave, optical
sensors in addition to ancillary data such as geo-
physical, geological, and geochemical information.
The present study focuses on multi-sensor data
fusion as it oAers distinct yet complementary
information to improve the performance of several
remote sensing applications. Formally, image
fusion can be deBned as the ‘combination of perti-
nent (or salient) information in order to synthesize
an image more informative and more suitable for
visual perception or computer processing’ (Thomas
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
et al. 2008). Fusion techniques can be grouped into
three categories, depending upon the stage at
which the assimilation of data from multiple sen-
sors takes place: (a) pixel level, (b) feature level,
and (c) decision level (Ehlers et al. 2010; Zhang
2010).
In this paper, an automatic and robust approach
to extract geological lineaments with the aid of
feature-based fusion of SAR and optical data is
proposed. For the present study, Sentinel 1 SAR
data in combination with ASTER optical imagery
is used. While optical data like ASTER can skill-
fully detect surface lineament features, sub-surface
lineaments occluded by vegetation, etc., can be
more accurately identiBed by means of SAR data.
A combination of the salient lineament maps
extracted using both the images results in an
accurate geological mapping of the study area.
To identify and select the bands of the multi-
spectral dataset useful for identiBcation and
delineation of lineament features, a novel PCA-
based band selection approach (Cadima and JolliAe
1995; Baisantry and Sao 2019) using component
loadings is proposed. Principal Component Anal-
ysis (PCA), a computationally eDcient and popu-
larly known feature extraction and dimensionality
reduction method in the remote sensing commu-
nity (Abdi and Williams 2010), has also been
strategically used in many band selection methods.
Given that the top principal components capture
most of the information about the data (Jollife and
Cadima 2016), a subset of bands can be selected
from the complete set of bands which are mainly
responsible for explaining the variance of the top
principal components. These information-rich
bands will be used for the extraction of lineament
features from the optical data. The resultant lin-
eament map will be fused with the lineament map
prepared using SAR data.
Additionally, directional analysis of the resul-
tant set of lineament features extracted by the
proposed technique is performed using Rose plot
utility developed on QGIS, a FOSS (Free and Open
Source Softwares) based GIS application.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
section 2 presents the automatic lineament
extraction framework using component loadings-
based band suitability framework and feature-level
fusion of lineament maps extracted from multiple
sensors. The section also introduces a utility
developed for azimuth analysis of the extracted
lineaments. Comprehensive discussion on the vali-
dation and analysis of the extracted maps is given
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
in section 3. Finally, conclusion of the paper is
given in section 4.
2. Methodology
The complete methodology for automatic extrac-
tion of lineament features using multi-sensor ima-
ges can be divided into four modules: pre-
processing satellite images, component loading
based selection of suitable bands, extraction of
lineament features, post-processing and correction
of extracted features. Finally, a new HSV colour
space-based mapping method for visualization and
directional analysis of the lineament features using
rose plot diagram is discussed.
The process Cow of the proposed methodology is
illustrated in Bgure 1 and elaborated below.
2.1 Data preparation
In the present study, the optical imagery used is
from ASTER, shown in Bgure 2. The sensor prop-
erties are listed in table 1. Use of moderate reso-
lution satellite imagery safeguards only naturally
occurring linear features such as vegetation pat-
terns, faults lines, etc., that are extracted using the
proposed algorithm unlike high-resolution images
which can easily confuse anthropogenic features as
lineaments. Date of acquisition of the scene is 20th
March 2008. The scene was downloaded in L1T
format from USGS Earth explorer (www.
earthexplorer.usgs.gov.in). Pre-processing of the
satellite data includes radiometric calibration is
done using ERDAS 2018.
Many times, lineament features are imperceptible in
the optical data either because they exist near sub-
surface or are occluded due to vegetation cover. To
compensate, VH polarization data of Sentinel 1
GRDH dataset in IW mode is used. The VH polar-
ization data is selected due to its ability to detect
salient geomorphic changes (Javhar et al. 2019). Scene
is acquired on 11th November 2018 in descending pass
and downloaded from Sentinel Open hub (https://
scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home). The reason
behind the date separation between the two datasets is
the formulation and commencement of the study.
Moreover, the availability of full spectral resolution
ASTER dataset also contributed. The image is pre-
processed for requisite SAR corrections such as topo-
graphic correction, speckle removal, etc., using the
SNAP. The resultant SAR-intensity (r0) shown in
Bgure 3 is used as an input for lineament extraction.
Page 3 of 15 111
2.2 Band suitability analysis using component
loadings
In this paper, a component loadings-based
approach (Cadima and JolliAe 1995; Baisantry
and Sao 2019) to select a subset of bands from the
available set of optical bands is discussed. It is
known that the top principal components capture
most of the information about the dataset
(Theodoridis and Koutroumbas 2009; Jollife and
Cadima 2016; Zou and Xue 2018). Thus, bands
that have high correlation with the top few com-
ponents are considered to be important and
informative. The correlation between the original
band and the principal component can be elo-
quently quantiBed using component loadings
(Dunteman 1989). Component loading of a band
for a principal component is deBned as the ratio
between the product of square root of Eigen value
and Eigen vector with square root of the variance
of the band.
The complete band suitability and selection
methodology can be explained as follows: First,
PCA is applied on the complete optical dataset to
estimate the principal components. Next, compo-
nent loadings of all bands for the top two princi-
pal components are calculated. Finally, bands
with the highest loadings with the chosen princi-
pal components are selected for extracting the
lineaments. These bands can be termed as prin-
cipal bands. The algorithm is mathematically
explained below:
Let us suppose a multispectral image having P
pixels and L bands be represented as matrix
X 2 RLXP . Using correlation matrix of the data, eigen
values k1, k2, k3, ..., kL and the associated principal
components w1, w2, ..., wL are calculated. Next,
component loadings of all bands for the top three
principal components are calculated as follows:
pffiffiffiffi
kj wm;j
cm;j ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffi ; ð1Þ
sm
where wm,j is the coefBcient for the mth band in the
jth principal component wj and sm is the variance
of the band. Then, the mth band is chosen as the
principal band bpj for jth principal component if:
bpj ¼ argmaxcm;j : ð2Þ
m2L
The principal bands bp1 ; bp2 are selected for top
two principal components, j = 1, 2 using
equation (2).
111 Page 4 of 15 J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111

Figure 1. Automatic extraction and analysis of lineament features using multisensory images: workCow.

Figure 2. Study area comprising parts of Dun Valley through ASTER standard FCC.
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111 Page 5 of 15 111

Table 1. ASTER sensor properties.

Spectral Spatial
Band range resolution Quantization
Sensor Subsystem/mode no. (lm) (m) level
ASTER VNIR 1 0.52–0.60 15 8 bits
2 0.63–0.69
3N/3B 0.78–0.86
SWIR 4 1.60–1.70 30 8 bits
5 2.145–2.185
6 2.185–2.225
7 2.235–2.285
8 2.295–2.365
9 2.360–2.430
TIR 10 8.125–8.475 90 12 bits
11 8.745–8.825
12 8.925–9.275
13 10.25–10.95
14 10.95–11.65

Figure 3. Sentinel 1 SAR r0 intensity.

111 Page 6 of 15
2.3 Extraction and fusion of lineaments
from multi-sensor data
The SAR intensity image as well as the multispectral
bands (principal bands) selected in section 2.2 are used
to extract lineament features using a well-known linear
feature extraction procedure called EDISON (Salui
2018). It assimilates conBdence-based edge detection
(Meer and Georgescu 2001) and meanshift-based
image segmentation (Comaniciu and Meer 2002) to
extract linear features. The edges are extracted using
Canny edge detection algorithm and the line segments
are adjusted to the candidate edge points based on
thresholds for gradient, fragment length, and hys-
teresis criteria for type, rank, and conBdence levels.
EDISON was implemented using the LINE module of
Geomatica 2017 software. Individual linear features
are extracted from both SAR and selected multispec-
tral bands. These maps serve as candidates for possible
lineaments in the study area and thus, would be sub-
jected to further processing.
2.4 Post-processing of extracted line features
Linear features extracted from the algorithm dis-
cussed in section 2.3 serve as preliminary candi-
dates for prospective geological lineaments. In the
present study, post-processing addresses the
removal of inconsistency errors in these prelimi-
nary linear features, as illustrated in Bgure 1.
Errors dealt with in the present study can be
divided into three categories:
1. Nearby line features intersecting at an angle,
less than a given threshold H can be traced as a
single lineament. In the present study, H is
taken as 10 (Bgure 4i).
2. Line features within a distance d, where d is the
spatial resolution, occurring due to the radio-
metric irregularities in the radiance data, can be
treated as a single lineament (Bgure 4i).
3. Some of the watershed boundaries are also be
mistaken as lineaments and need to be removed
through watershed delineation using ASTER
DEM.
2.5 Directional analysis for extracted
lineaments
To understand the regional tectonic regime of the
area, directional analysis of the lineaments is car-
ried out with the aid of rose plot diagram of the
extracted linear features. The directional analysis
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
includes information about magnitude and direc-
tion of the lineament features. Rose plot diagram
(Reboussin 2005) is a graphic tool which gives a
succinct view of magnitude and direction of a set of
features distributed over a given region. Using the
polar coordinate system of gridding, the frequency
of features (in this case, lineaments) is plotted such
that the direction of the longest spoke shows the
direction where most of the lineaments lie. The plot
has been divided into 12 cardinal directions: 0
(North), 30, 60, …, 330, 360 degrees.
Slope method was used to calculate the direction
of the lineament features. The direction / for each
lineament feature whose initial coordinates and
Bnal coordinates can be represented as (x1, y1) and
(x2, y2) can be deBned as follows:
y2  y1
/ ¼ tan1 : ð3Þ
x2  x1
Similarly, the magnitude or strength of the
lineament feature l is calculated as:
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
l ¼ ðx 2  x 1 Þ2 þ ðy 2  y1 Þ2 : ð4Þ
Since inverse of tan lies in the range [p, p], / is
adjusted to the range of [0, p] with the y-axis
(North) as the reference.
Since rose plot is the polar representation of the
histogram of the directional or azimuthal data, it is
prepared by Brst dividing the range [0, 2p] into a
Figure 4. Different types of errors encountered and corrected
in lineament extraction during the study.
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111 Page 7 of 15 111

Table 2. Parameters used in LINE module for the present study.

Dataset ASTER band 5 ASTER band 3 Sentinal 1A

Filter radius 20 25 15
Edge gradient threshold 150 175 80
Curve length threshold 50 50 20
Line Btting error 10 10 30
Angular difference 45 45 45
Linking distance 30 30 30

Bxed number of bins. Here, each petal of rose plot Table 3. Principle components (PC) eigen vector matrix.
represents an azimuthal range and the length of the
PC components
petal is proportional to the number of lineaments
(scaled to [0, 1]) whose direction falls within the Bands 1 2 3
given range of the petal. 1 0.314 –0.274 –0.633
To assign colours to the rose plot, the histogram 2 0.334 –0.141 –0.530
values are mapped to the hue component of the 3 0.188 0.872 0.382
HSV colour map (Weeks 1996; Reinhard et al. 4 0.349 –0.003 0.337
2001). HSV-based colour mapping is considered to 5 0.367 0.153 0.129
6 0.357 0.149 0.137
be more visually appealing than the RGB-based
7 0.358 0.144 0.088
colour mapping. This is because changes in fre-
8 0.357 0.174 0.087
quency are directly mapped by the hue component 9 0.350 0.218 0.084
which represent the predominant wavelength of
the colour. It is known that a human eye can detect
changes in colour more intelligibly than the chan-
ges in brightness or intensity. Thus, small changes 3. Study area and experimental setup
in frequency can be mapped more noticeably by the
hue component. The colour mapping is deBned as 3.1 Study area
below: To validate the proposed algorithm, a suit-
hcolour ðiÞ ¼ H ðiÞ; ð5Þ able study area consisting parts of Dun valley
with an area of nearly 280 km2 in Uttrakhand,
scolour ðiÞ ¼ 1; ð6Þ India (Bgure 2) is selected. The region consists of
many neotectonic structural features with surB-
vcolour ðiÞ ¼ 1; ð7Þ cial geomorphic expressions. The area is covered
with moderate to dense vegetation and comprises
where of many perennial channels coming down from
N ðiÞ the Himalayas. Geologically, the lesser Hima-
H ðiÞ ¼ ; ð8Þ layas is tectonically parted from Sub-Himalayan
Ntot
zone by the Main Boundary Thrust (MBT)
where H(i) is the histogram bin representing the (Kumar Singh et al. 2001; Singh et al. 2007). The
proportion of lineaments and N(i) is the number of Sub-Himalaya encompasses molassic sedimen-
lineaments whose direction falls within the range tary series (Siwaliks) deposited in a foreland
[hi, hi+1], Ntot is the total number of lineaments, basin obverse to the elevating Himalayas (Krol
hcolour(i), scolour(i) and vcolour(i) are the H, S, and Tal formation of lesser Himalayas) through
V values of the rose petal for the range [hi, hi+1]. the Tertiary era. Successive distortion in the Sub-
Due to the fact that human vision perceives vari- Himalayan zone is billeted by a southward pro-
ations in hues more eAectively than variations in mulgating fold-thrust scheme, which steered the
intensity or saturation, HSV colour space is used way to the growth of longitudinal, front-parallel
for better representation of the polar histogram. inter-montane valleys, called Duns (Thakur et al.
This simple ability makes the representation more 2007). Siwaliks are folded here into Mohand
meaningful. anticline which also comprises the Himalayan
111 Page 8 of 15
Figure 5. (a) Lineaments extracted from ASTER band 3 and 5; and (b) lineaments extracted from Sentinel 1 dataset.
frontal thrust, the dun syncline and Santaurgarh
Anticline. In the north, post-MBT is the Mus-
sorie antiformal syncline (Karunakaran and Rao
1979). The whole area lies between two major
rivers, i.e., Ganges and Yamuna, and has a gen-
eral trend of NW–SE. The structural regime of
the area is well established by GSI and many
workers (Thakur and Pandey 2004a) which is
used for validation of the present work.
3.2 Experimental setup
As a pre-processing step, the images are geomet-
rically co-registered keeping ASTER images as
reference before their usage using ArcGIS. The
spatial resolution of ASTER NIR bands is 15 m,
SWIR is 30 m while the Bnal square pixel size
during slant to ground range conversion of Sentinel
1 is taken as 15 m, also for the full range of its
incidence angles, although it has the capability of
an output of 10 m. Since there is a difference in the
spatial resolutions of the images used, the spatial
resolution is resampled to 30 m for all the bands
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
(MSS and SAR). Moreover, the study area used for
lineament extraction is kept restricted within the
swath of ASTER. The component loadings-based
band selection algorithm is programmed and eval-
uated using Matlab 2015a on Intel Xeon-based
workstation 2.2 Ghz with 16 GB of RAM. To
extract the lineament features, the LINE module
of Geomatica software is used. The parameters
used to extract the lineaments through LINE
module in this study are listed in table 2. These
values depend on the type of dataset and its spatial
resolution. Further, the principal components
Eigen vector matrix is provided in table 3.
In addition, the rose plot utility for analysis of
lineament features has been developed on QGIS 3.4
using Python 3.7 Integrated Development and
Learning Environment (IDLE). Quantum GIS
(QGIS) is free, open-source and cross-platform
software which includes all of the common GIS
functions and features and has a comprehensible
user-friendly interface. It has a vast repository of
oDcial and third-party plugins which provide a large
number of additional functionality. Developers can
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
Figure 6. Lineament map after post-processing and correction of features from optical and SAR datasets.
also create their own plugins using Python or C++
and compile them with the existing source code to
extend functionality (Mearns 2010; QGIS 2014).
4. Results and discussion
In this work, lineaments, both surface and sub-
surface have been extracted using feature-based
fusion of Optical-SAR images.
4.1 Lineament extraction using feature-based
optical-SAR fusion
Using the LINE module of Geomatica software, the
lineaments were extracted from both ASTER and
Sentinel-1 dataset, as shown in Bgure 5(a and b).
Although, there have been many studies (Mah
€
et al. 1995; Olgen 2004) which has used Landsat
data for extraction of lineament features, in the
present study, ASTER has been used due to two
reasons.
Page 9 of 15 111
i. Many of the ions necessary for mineral and rock
identiBcation show distinct absorptive charac-
teristics in the SWIR region of the electromag-
netic spectrum. Thus, presence of large number
of SWIR bands in ASTER data leads to accurate
identiBcation for these ions (Zhang and Zhou
2017).
ii. Moderate spatial resolution minimizes the erro-
neous identiBcation and classiBcation of anthro-
pogenic linear features such as roads, dams,
etc., as geological features. Such properties aid
in delineating high-frequency lines separating
two land cover or land use classes (different
rock/soil types in the case of bare land).
SAR imagery allows identiBcation of lineament
features that exist near sub-surface or are occluded
by the vegetation cover and thus, are imperceptible
in the optical data.
For the present study, the top two principal
components were used for selecting the principal
bands using the method described in 2.2. After
111 Page 10 of 15
Figure 7. Major thrusts in Dun Valley region after Thakur and Pandey (2004a).
observing the component loadings of all the bands
for the top two principal components, it was found
that band 3 and 5 are maximally correlated with
Brst and second principal band respectively, i.e.,
palpable from table 3. It is evident from
Bgure 5(a) that these images are capable of delin-
eating surface lineaments originating due to litho-
logical changes, LULC boundaries or other tectonic
and geomorphic activities.
From the comparison of Bgure 5(a and b), it can
be observed that while optical images can only
detect surface lineaments, SAR images exhibit
greater capability in the extraction of sub-surface
lineament features. It can be seen in
Bgure 5(b) that Sentinel 1, owing to its soil pene-
tration power and sensitivity to changes in mois-
ture properties, has not only identiBed lineaments
which are geologically important on the surface but
also those which may be below the surface. The
lineament maps extracted from both optical and
SAR images require further processing and cor-
rections to remove generic line features (radio-
metric variations due to illumination, etc.)
misclassiBed as lineaments. The lineaments
extracted from band 3, 5 of ASTER and SAR
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
dataset were 620, 845 and 732, respectively. After
post-processing the lineament maps using the
process discussed in 2.4, total number of linea-
ments in the map shown in Bgure 5(a and b)
reduced from 2197 total to 1833. Out of the omit-
ted 364 lineaments, 156 were intersecting each
other at a lesser angle than 10, while 120 of them
were within the range of 30 m of each other and
rest of them were actually watershed boundaries
(section 2.4). The lineament maps obtained from
optical as well as SAR images are combined toge-
ther (feature-level fusion) for a better under-
standing of the geological, especially tectonic
regime of the study area. The fused product is
further subjected to the same post-processing step
to remove duplication of the same lineament fea-
ture extracted in both the maps as well as to
combine the broken lineament features (due to
radiometric inconsistencies). The Bnal product is
shown in Bgure 6. It is evident from the Bgure that
all major tectonic features of the study area shown
in Bgure 7 have been identiBed by the optical
dataset as evident from the sudden changes in the
vegetation patterns as well as lithology along the
thrust lines as illustrated in Bgures 8 and 9.
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
Figure 8. Thrust identiBed at (a) through extracted lineament features; sudden difference in vegetation pattern marked at (b) by
extracted lineaments.
All the extracted lineaments for major tectonic
features are validated using the seismo-tectonic
map of the region published by GSI and the Beld
investigation studies by Thakur et al. (2007) and
Thakur and Pandey (2004a, b). The proposed
methodology has succeeded in mapping almost all
the major lineaments within the study area.
Moreover, all the major tectonic features, which
are parallel to the look angle of the Sentinel sensor,
are easily identiBable in SAR lineament map. On
the other hand, the intensity variations due to
sudden variation in vegetation pattern (marked b
in Bgure 8) or due to sudden variations in litho-
logical pattern (lower to middle and middle to
upper Siwaliks, respectively) are also identiBed in
the lineament map of ASTER data in (Sinha and
Sinha 2016; Srivastava et al. 2016).
Some of the major lineament features are obliter-
ated intermittently due to anthropogenic activities.
So, partly the surface expression of the lineament at
places is well depicted in the optical image, which can
be treated as break-lines of a single curvilinear fea-
ture (Sidiropoulou Velidou et al. 2015). However, the
concealed portion is deciphered with the help of soil
moisture property or near sub-surface expressions in
Page 11 of 15 111
the SAR-based lineaments. Hence, fusing both opti-
cal and SAR imageries as illustrated in Bgure 9 could
display the continuity of the lineament features. The
fusion technique of the present endeavour (Bgures 6,
8 and 9) has demonstrated the utility of the proposed
methodology.
The present study has also brought out that
most of the major geologic discontinuities, e.g.,
MBT, Koti thrust in the region are not always
straight but can be seen as curved lines (Bgure 9).
Additionally, many sub-surface lineaments,
specifically in barren regions and to some extent, in
the areas with sparse vegetation, have been accu-
rately identiBed by the SAR dataset (Bgure 5b). It
is prominent from Bgure 10 that it is also able to
demarcate the unusual vegetation pattern in few
areas, which might depict sub-surface tectonic
features/cracks/joints controlling the vegetation
pattern. This observation is further asserted in Dey
and Sarkar (2012) according to which, the presence
of joints/cracks or any linear tectonic features in
the sub-surface could result in sudden and unusu-
ally linear vegetation patterns as roots grow as per
the direction of cracks and the moisture also Cows
alongside.
111 Page 12 of 15 J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111

Figure 9. Comparison of the major thrusts (mapped) and as identiBed by the proposed methodology.

Figure 10. Unusual vegetation patterns depicted by SAR data predicting geological control of vegetation.
J. Earth Syst. Sci. (2022)131:111
Figure 11. Lineament analysis tool showing the rose plot diagram of the study area.
4.2 Rose plot analysis of the lineament features
The direction of tectonic discontinuities occurring
within the test site has been asserted using the rose
plot of the extracted features. Figure 11 shows the
rose plot diagram of the fused lineament map
plotted using x-axis (horizontal) as the base. The
rose plot diagram corroborates with the azimuth
characteristics of the lineaments. The literature
survey indicates that the major lineaments lie
predominantly along the NW–SE and NE–SW
direction which is eminent from Bgure 5. It can be
corroborated from the rose plot diagram that the
dominant lineaments tend along NE–SW direction
and few major ones in NW–SE. The major thrusts
in this study area, predominantly MBT, HFT,
Asan Fault, etc., lie within the direction predicted
by the algorithm.
5. Conclusion and future work
The proposed lineament extraction method using the
feature-based fusion of optical and SAR dataset is
capable of extracting most of the geological lineaments
with better accuracy. It is also validated with maps
generated through ground surveys by GSI. The tech-
nique could be used for inaccessible areas to map
weaker zones of large areas. Optical and SAR data
Page 13 of 15 111
because of their inherent spectral properties display
the utility of the fusion methodology proposed. In
order to enhance the detection capabilities of the
optical dataset, a component loadings-based band
selection technique has been introduced to identify and
select the most informative bands within the optical
dataset. Finally, a visual interpretation and analysis
tool has been developed using open source tools for the
directional analysis of large volumes of lineament data
to analyze the predominant orientation. Future work
in this study includes development of a knowledge-
based correction technique for more robust omission of
lineaments other than that of geological importance.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude
to Dr L K Sinha (Retd.), Director, DTRL (Now
DGRE) for providing the necessary support to
carry out the research work in the laboratory and
to publish the work.
Author statement
The Brst two authors of the manuscript have
almost equally contributed to the article in both
111 Page 14 of 15
processing and analysis of the data. The third
author has placed the idea of the work in front of
the Brst two authors and guided along the way.
Also, all the three authors have equally contributed
to the completion of the manuscript.
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