A photopollution index based on weighted cumulative visibility to night lights

A method is presented to estimate photopollution (a.k.a night-lights pollution) in a macroscopic manner, i.e. that can be applied globally, using open-domain data. Photopollution has two components, direct illumination and skyglow i.e. the diffused scattering of light in the atmosphere. The proposed method is currently focusing on direct illumination only. The novelty is that viewshed analysis is deployed, taking into account the viewing distance as well as the amount of the light at each source. Moreover, monthly variation of photopollution is measured based on recently available suitable data.