As the growing interest in the use of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) low light data, there is an urgent need to obtain high accuracy product at low radiances. Currently the low light calibration accuracy was previously estimated at a moderate 15% using extended sources while the long-term stability has yet to be characterized. This paper gives a new method to quantitative analysis DNB data by using a specialized ground light point source at night, which is active designed light sources at selected site (Baotou of Inner Mongolia, China). It presents a possibility to resolve the need for SI traceable active light sources to monitor the calibration stability, radiometric and geolocation accuracy, and point spread functions of the DNB.
Abstract. As a naturally part of information technology, Remote Sensing (RS) is strongly required to provide very precise and accurate information product to serve industry, academy and the public at this information economic era. To meet the needs of high quality RS product, building a fully functional and advanced calibration system, including measuring instruments, measuring approaches and target site become extremely important. Supported by MOST of China via national plan, great progress has been made to construct a comprehensive calibration and validation (Cal&Val) site, which integrates most functions of RS sensor aviation testing, EO satellite on-orbit caration and performance assessment and RS product validation at this site located in Baotou, 600km west of Beijing. The site is equipped with various artificial standard targets, including portable and permanent targets, which supports for long-term calibration and validation. A number of fine-designed ground measuring instruments and airborne standard sensors are developed for realizing high-accuracy stepwise validation, an approach in avoiding or reducing uncertainties caused from nonsynchronized measurement. As part of contribution to worldwide Cal&Val study coordinated by CEOS-WGCV, Baotou site is offering its support to Radiometric Calibration Network of Automated Instruments (RadCalNet), with an aim of providing demonstrated global standard automated radiometric calibration service in cooperation with ESA, NASA, CNES and NPL. Furthermore, several Cal&Val campaigns have been performed during the past years to calibrate and validate the spaceborne/airborne optical and SAR sensors, and the results of some typical demonstration are discussed in this study.
The assessment of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image resolution is essential to characterize and improve sensor performance, and to make better application of the acquired SAR data. Trihedral corner reflectors and active transponders have been widely used as standard point targets for SAR image spatial resolution assessment. However, these point targets have limitations in straight-forward result reveal and tolerance in deployment and processing errors. In light of the bar-pattern target which widely used for optical image resolution assessment, and to assess the image resolution of the SAR sensors operating at different frequency, different platform (airborne and spaceborne), a permanent bar-pattern target was designed and realized by black gravel and greyish white concrete bars. Gravel size, bar direction and width were carefully calculated according to the requirement of long-term operation. The effectiveness of the target was preliminarily validated by C-band airborne SAR, X-band spaceborne SAR data and optical image, and the result shows that the target is suitable for the spatial resolution assessment of both high-resolution SAR and optical sensors.
The surface of the earth is considered as a unified elevation when satellite remote sensing platforms imaging,but these problems such as target missing and target detection repeatition will be caused significantly with high-resolution sensor in staring mode.Based on the analysis to these problems,a new method to control the satellite attitude combining with low accuracy DEM within payload's ability is put forward in this paper.Futhermore based on World Wind a three-dimensional Earth data browsing software developed by NASA,the Effect Drawing of satellite's attitude control considering the DEM is shown,which provides a new method to obtain high-precision data.
Performances analysis of remote sensing sensor is required to pursue a range of scientific research and application objectives. Laboratory analysis of any remote sensing instrument is essential, but not sufficient to establish a valid inflight one. In this study, with the aid of the in situ measurements and corresponding image of three-gray scale permanent artificial target, the in-flight radiometric performances analyses (in-flight radiometric calibration, dynamic range and response linearity, signal-noise-ratio (SNR), radiometric resolution) of self-developed short-wave infrared (SWIR) camera are performed. To acquire the inflight calibration coefficients of the SWIR camera, the at-sensor radiances (Li) for the artificial targets are firstly simulated with in situ measurements (atmosphere parameter and spectral reflectance of the target) and viewing geometries using MODTRAN model. With these radiances and the corresponding digital numbers (DN) in the image, a straight line with a formulation of L = G × DN + B is fitted by a minimization regression method, and the fitted coefficients, G and B, are inflight calibration coefficients. And then the high point (LH) and the low point (LL) of dynamic range can be described as LH= (G × DNH + B) and LL= B, respectively, where DNH is equal to 2n − 1 (n is the quantization number of the payload). Meanwhile, the sensor’s response linearity (δ) is described as the correlation coefficient of the regressed line. The results show that the calibration coefficients (G and B) are 0.0083 W·sr−1m−2μm−1 and −3.5 W·sr−1m−2μm−1; the low point of dynamic range is −3.5 W·sr−1m−2μm−1 and the high point is 30.5 W·sr−1m−2μm−1; the response linearity is approximately 99%. Furthermore, a SNR normalization method is used to assess the sensor’s SNR, and the normalized SNR is about 59.6 when the mean value of radiance is equal to 11.0 W·sr−1m−2μm−1; subsequently, the radiometric resolution is calculated about 0.1845 W•sr-1m-2μm-1. Moreover, in order to validate the result, a comparison of the measured radiance with a radiative-transfer-code-predicted over four portable artificial targets with reflectance of 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% respectively, is performed. It is noted that relative error for the calibration is within 6.6%. Keywords—Calibration, dynamic range, radiometric resolution, SNR.
Thermal infrared remotely sensed data, by capturing the thermal radiation characteristics emitted by the Earth’s surface, plays a pivotal role in various domains, such as environmental monitoring, resource exploration, agricultural assessment, and disaster early warning. However, the acquisition of thermal infrared hyperspectral remotely sensed imagery necessitates more complex and higher-precision sensors, which in turn leads to higher research and operational costs. In this study, a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)–Transformer combined block, termed CTBNet, is proposed to address the challenge of thermal infrared multispectral image spectral reconstruction. Specifically, the CTBNet comprises blocks that integrate CNN and Transformer technologies (CTB). Within these CTBs, an improved self-attention mechanism is introduced, which not only considers features across spatial and spectral dimensions concurrently, but also explicitly extracts incremental features from each channel. Compared to other algorithms, the proposed method more closely aligns with the true spectral curves in the reconstruction of hyperspectral images across the spectral dimension. Through a series of experiments, this approach has been proven to ensure robustness and generalizability, outperforming some state-of-the-art algorithms across various metrics.
Robust calibration and validation (Cal and Val) should guarantee the accuracy of the retrieved information, make the remote sensing data consistent and traceable, and maintain the sensor performance during the operational phase. The DRAGON program has set up many remote sensing research topics on various application domains. In order to promote the effectiveness of data modeling and interpretation, it is necessary to solve various challenges in Cal and Val for quantitative RS applications. This project in the DRAGON 4 program aims to promote the cooperation of the Cal and Val experts from European and Chinese institutes in Cal and Val activities, and several achievements have been obtained in the advanced on-orbit optical sensor calibration, as well as microwave remote sensor calibration and product generation. The outcomes of the project have benefited the related remote sensing modeling and product retrieval, and promoted the radiometric calibration network (RadCalNet) as an international operational network for calibration, intercalibration, and validation. Moreover, this project provided local governments with a more accurate OMI NO2 data in China, which were used to study the air quality control during APEC period, Parade period and G20 period. This will be of ongoing be value for monitoring atmospheric environmental quality and formulating pollution control strategies.
The advanced hyperspectral imager (AHSI) is one of the sensors aboard the Chinese Gaofen-5 (GF-5) satellite, possessing characteristics of high spatial and spectral resolution, as well as width swath. To better understand the radiometric performance of GF-5/AHIS after its launch, this article presents an on-orbit radiometric calibration approach for AHSI visible and near-infrared (VNIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensors from field automatic observations with a field spectrometer in the absence of SWIR measurements. A spectrum extension method was proposed to extend the retrieved surface hyperspectral reflectance in the VNIR spectral ranges to SWIR by incorporating the historical hyperspectral reflectance library. The radiometric calibration coefficients of GF-5/AHSI were calculated by linear fitting of the observed digital number (DN) values with GF-5/AHSI and predicted at-sensor radiances with MODTRAN 5 based on extended hyperspectral surface reflectance. Comparisons with onboard calibration results were also performed, and the averaged relative differences were within 5% with $1\delta $ standard deviations less than 10% for most bands, except for those in the atmospheric absorption and low signal-to-noise ratio bands. The comparison results indicate that the on-site radiometric calibration results are consistent with the onboard results, and the operational on-orbit radiometric calibration approach is reliable in the case that there are no measurements in the SWIR spectra range. The on-orbit radiometric performance of GF-5/AHSI rapidly degraded during the first several months after its launch and then tended to be relatively stable.
'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(23.036 .093 25.536)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(45.87 1.273 16.18)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(69.945 .996 12.078)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(20.66 -19.689 31.932)'/%3e%3c/svg%3e)
