Synthetic scene simulator for hyperspectral spaceborne passive optical sensors. Application to ESA's FLEX/sentinel-3 tandem mission

摘要

The simulation of synthetic images serve scientists and engineers to study the instrument configuration as well as to develop image processing and retrieval strategies for a sensor in development. Despite synthetic scene simulators have been developed in the past in the frame of satellite missions, their functionality and flexibility to create a user-defined scene is limited by their architecture, design and implementation. This paper introduces the design of a generic scene simulator with the flexibility to generate realistic synthetic scenes by configuration of the surface and atmosphere. Following this generic design, a scene simulator is being developed for the ESA's Earth Explorer 8th candidate mission FLEX in order to reproduce the high spectral resolution signal acquired by its hyperspectral instrument. The proposed design and architecture can be adapted to any other passive optical space and airborne instruments.