Physically Based Approach for Combined Atmospheric and Topographic Corrections

Abstract

The enhanced spectral and spatial resolutions of the remote sensors have increased the need for highly performing preprocessing procedures. In this paper, a comprehensive approach, which simultaneously performs atmospheric and topographic corrections and includes second order corrections such as adjacency effects, was presented. The method, developed under the assumption of Lambertian surfaces, is physically based and uses MODTRAN 4 radiative transfer model. The use of MODTRAN 4 for the estimates of the radiative quantities was widely discussed in the paper and the impact on remote sensing applications was shown through a series of test cases.

Keywords

• radiative transfer
• physical model
• atmospheric correction
• topographic correction
• adjacency effect
• landsat
• sentinel
• terrain harmonization
• remote sensing