Highly accurate Geometric Correction for NOAA AVHRR data considering the feature of elevation and the feature of coastline

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) satellite images have been widely used for environmental and land cover monitoring. This paper proposes a geometric correction method that corrects the geometric distortions in NOAA images. In this method, the errors in NOAA images are corrected in the image coordinate system before transforming into the map coordinate system. First, the variation of elevation is verified to divide data into flat and rough blocks. Next, in order to measure the distortions more precisely, more GCP (Ground Control Point) templates are generated based on the feature of the coastline and the elevation errors of these GCP templates are corrected. After using GCP template matching to specify the residual errors, which are used to represent the distortions, affine transform and Radial Basis Function transform are used to correct the distortions on the flat and rough blocks, respectively. With the proposed method, the average values of the error after correction are smaller than 0.2 pixels on both latitude and longitude directions. This result proved that the proposed method is a highly accurate geometric correction method.