A Relative Radiometric Correction Method for Airborne Image Using Outdoor Calibration and Image Statistics

The Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (AHI) is a civilian remote sensor made in China, which uses a multichip charge-coupled device (CCD) butting technology to enlarge the frame. With the aging of the sensor, overall nonuniformity and stripe noises are observed. To solve these problems, a new idea of using the outdoor calibration and the image statistics together was developed to correct AHI images. In this method, outdoor calibration was conducted to calculate the relative radiometric calibration coefficient of each CCD detector for correcting the overall nonuniformity of an image. Then, image statistics were used to remove the residual stripes. This paper presents the principle, the experiment, and the results of this method. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it was compared with some other methods and was evaluated by three quality indices. Moreover, the effects of each step of this method were analyzed separately. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method is convenient and practical for the relative radiometric correction of an airborne image.