New version of SAMS released
Version 3.2 of SAMS (Spectral Analysis and Management System) has been released by the Centre for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS) at the University of California, Davis. This is a very useful package for visualising and analysing spectral data from many different sources, including field spectroradiometers from the major manufacturers. A document describing how to get started with SAMS has recently been added to the NCAVEO resources page, together with some sample data.
SAMS (Spectral Analysis and Management System) is a software package produced by the Centre for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS) at the University of California, Davis. It may be downloaded from the CSTARS website: http://sams.casil.ucdavis.edu/ and is freely available for educational purposes.
Spectra may be processed by many different software packages, including general purpose data analysis programs (e.g. Excel) and array-based programming languages (e.g. Matlab, IDL). However, SAMS has a number of advantages over these programs:
Spectra may be entered in the native formats of the two most commonly used manufacturers, Analytical Spectral Devices (ASD) and Spectravista (formerly GER, the Geophysical Environmental Corporation).
Spectra may be imported as ASCII (plain text) files and the program will guess the number of header lines and how the data are organised. It normally does a pretty good job of this, but it is important to check by viewing the data.
Spectra may be organised into groups for convenience and saved in SAMS databases.
Spectra are linked to metadata (data about data). These additional metadata fields may be used to store additional information about the target or the conditions of measurement, for example.
Commonly used spectral functions are programmed into SAMS (e.g. the extraction of spectral indices).
If you would like to experiment with SAMS you can download the software and manual from the website above and you will find an introduction to using the program, together with some sample data, on the NCAVEO resources page.
