Automatic atmospheric correction for shortwave hyperspectral remote sensing data using a time-dependent deep neural network

Abstract Atmospheric correction is an essential step in hyperspectral imaging and target detection from spectrometer remote sensing data. State-of-the-art atmospheric correction approaches either require extensive filed experiments or prior knowledge of atmospheric characteristics to improve the predicted accuracy, which are computational expensive and unsuitable for real time application. To take full advantages of remote sensing observation in quickly and reliably acquiring data for a large area, an automatic and efficient processing tool is required for atmospheric correction. In this paper, we propose a time-dependent neural network for automatic atmospheric correction and target detection using multi-scan hyperspectral data under different elevation angles. In addition to the total radiance, the collection day and time are also incorporated to improve the time-dependency of the network and represent the seasonal and diurnal characteristics of atmosphere and solar radiation. Results show that the proposed network has the capacity to accurately provide atmospheric characteristics and estimate precise reflectivity spectra with 95.72 % averaged accuracy for different materials, including vegetation, sea ice, and ocean. Additional experiments are designed to investigate the network’s temporal dependency and performance on missing data. The error analysis confirms that our proposed network is capable of estimating atmospheric characteristics under both seasonally and diurnally varying environments and handling the influence of missing data. Both the predicted results and error analysis are promising and demonstrate that our network has the ability of providing accurate atmospheric correction and target detection in real time.