Glossary for Geospatial Science

Kauth’s Tasseled Cap or Kauth’s greenness / brightness / wetness:  A set of linear combinations of the Landsat TM spectral bands which computationally reduce the images to maps of a site’s greenness, brightness, and wetness.  Kauth, a scientist at the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, extended the green biomass concepts developed by Dr. Lee D. Miller, a principal of MicroImages, to extract more biophysical information from Landsat MSS and TM multispectral images.  He developed the combinations by carefully correlating ground measurements made by Miller and others with values in the satellite images.  The plots of the data distribution in the original spectral bands resemble a tasseled cap — hence the general name by which these transformations are called.