A new method for atmospheric correction and aerosol optical property retrieval for VIS-SWIR multi- and hyperspectral imaging sensors: QUAC (QUick atmospheric correction)

Abstract : We describe a new VNIR-SWIR atmospheric correction method for multi- and hyperspectral imagery, dubbed QUAC (QUick Atmospheric Correction) that also enables retrieval of the wavelength-dependent optical depth of the aerosol or haze and molecular absorbers. It determines the atmospheric compensation parameters directly from the information contained within the scene using the observed pixel spectra. The approach is based on the empirical finding that the spectral standard deviation of a collection of diverse material spectra, such as the endmember spectra in a scene, is essentially spectrally flat. It allows the retrieval of reasonably accurate reflectance spectra even when the sensor does not have a proper radiometric or wavelength calibration, or when the solar illumination intensity is unknown. The computational speed of the atmospheric correction method is significantly faster than for the first-principles methods, making it potentially suitable for realtime applications. The aerosol optical depth retrieval method, unlike most prior methods, does not require the presence of dark pixels. In this paper, QUAC is applied to atmospherically correction several AVIRIS data sets. Comparisons to the physics-based FLAASH code are also presented.