IMPROVING LOCAL ADAPTIVE FILTERING METHOD EMPLOYED IN RADIOMETRIC CORRECTION OF ANALOGUE AIRBORNE CAMPAIGNS

Abstract

An orthophotomosaic is as a single image that can be layered on a map. It is produced from a set of aerial images impaired by radiometric inhomogeneity mostly due to atmospheric phenomena, like hotspot, haze or high altitude clouds shadows as well as the camera itself, like lens vignetting. These create some unsightly radiometric inhomogeneity in the mosaic that could be corrected by using a local adaptive filter, also named Wallis filter. Yet this solution leads to a significant loss of contrast at small scales. This current work introduces two elementary studies. In a first time, in order to quantify the loss of contrast due to the use of Wallis filter, a simple multi-scale score is proposed based on mathematical morphology operations. In a second time, an optimal window size for the filter is identified by considering some systematic radiometric behaviours in the images forming the mosaic through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). These two elementary studies are preliminary steps leading to a method of radiometric correction combining Wallis filtering and PCA.