Mosaicking of optical remote sensing imagery

Recent remote sensing applications are moving from an interpretation of single image swaths to regional mosaics. Within-swath and between-swath radiometric variations and ortho-rectification errors, especially for airborne sensors with a wide field of view, cause most of the problems during the mosaicking process. The proposed procedure for mosaicking consists of the following three steps. Within-swath radiometric normalization is performed using an image-based empirical radiometric correction method, which accounts for sensor viewing angle effects. Individual swaths are ortho-rectified using a direct geo-referencing approach. To remove the between-swath radiometric variations we propose to use the radiometric correction method, which is based on the information contained in the overlapping region of the swaths. The experiments for data acquired by airborne multi-spectral scanner DAEDALUS AADS 1268 ATM show the effectiveness and potential of the proposed method especially for the thematic analysis applications.