Improved Vicarious Radiometric Calibration Method Considering Adjacency Effect for High Resolution Optical Sensors

When using field calibration site to perform on-orbit radiometric calibration for a space-borne remote sensor, the observed signal of the sensor may contain energy from adjacent pixels, due to existence of the earth atmosphere and sensor viewing characteristics. Hence the accuracy of radiometric calibration will be decreased to some extent. When calibration of high-resolution sensor is concerned, the non-uniformity of the ground target will be relatively more obvious. In addition, if the brightness contrast of neighboring targets is not small, the impact of adjacency effect will be more outstanding. How to quantitatively analyze and eliminate the influence of this kind of adjacency effect, becomes an actual demand to reduce the uncertainty of on-orbit radiometric calibration. Aiming at the adjacent effect caused by atmospheric multiple scattering, this paper analyzed radiation transfer mechanism first, then constructed a local atmospheric point spread function model using long time-series satellite-ground synchronous observation data, developed an adjacency effect correction method used in on-orbit vicarious calibration, which considers background reflectance spectral information. Test on Sentinel-2A imagery indicates that the proposed correction method can effectively alleviate the influence of adjacency effect in vicarious calibration.