Radiometric rectification - Toward a common radiometric response among multidate, multisensor images

A method is developed for relating scene digital counts among several images of the same scene by identifying radiometric control sets with mean reflectances that are basically constant. The average digital-count values of the control sets are utilized to compute linear transforms that relate digital count values between images. Two Landsat TM images are studied by means of the technique using simulations of a wide range of atmospheric conditions. In the visible and near-IR bands the algorithm effectively adjusts the surface reflectance for the effects of relative atmospheric differences to within 1 percent. The proposed method is found to be an effective relative correction procedure that can be used when atmospheric optical-depth data and calibration coefficients are not available.