Characterization of physics-based radiative transfer modelingparameters for a blind test airborne hyperspectral data set

摘要

This work was motivated by the availability of a new ground truthed hyperspectral data set, freely accessible to thescientific community for target detection algorithm testing. In our research, we are interested in physics-basedapproaches to target detection, i.e. those techniques aimed at modeling the radiation transfer within the atmosphere inorder to account for atmospheric/viewing/illumination effects. This is a crucial aspect in target detection applications,where the available information resides in the sensor-acquired radiance image and field-measured spectral reflectances ofthe targets. Properly backing out the aforementioned effects allows detection to be performed in either of the twodomains, i.e. radiance or reflectance. As part of our research into the use of physics-based radiative transfer modeling(RTM) for target detection with these new data, it was important to accurately analyze the available a priori informationconcerning data acquisition, and investigate the value of enhancing this information by making use of freely accessiblemeteorological and environmental data. In this work, the characterization procedure of the RTM parameters applied tothese data is described, and the corresponding RTM parameters thus obtained are reported. A range of variation for someof these parameters were determined as well, in order to allow for a certain degree of variability around nominalconditions (e.g. spatial variability within the scene, non-perfect acquisition condition knowledge, etc.). Target detectionresults obtained by adopting the RTM parameters attained by the characterization procedure show similar performance inboth the radiance and the reflectance domains.