Correction of Stray-Light-Driven Interslot Radiometric Discrepancy (ISRD) Present in Radiometric Products of Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI)

The radiometric calibration of satellite data is critical in many environmental studies and applications that are based on remote sensing data. The Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) has suffered from what is called an interslot radiometric discrepancy (ISRD), which creates clear inconsistency between the adjacent slots in GOCI Level 1B (L1B) radiometric products, the largest source of which is currently believed to be the stray light generated in the sensor instrument. Difficulties in removing the stray-light-driven anomalies are that the intensity and the spatial extent vary with time and location, depending on the reflectance of nearby bright targets, such as cloud and land. This paper proposes an image-based correction method that removes the stray-light-driven radiometric inflation without involving an independent reference so that the method can be used for GOCI operational data processing. First, the radiometric inflation pattern is characterized by independent sources, such as Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) data, and the inflation pattern is modeled by the minimum noise fraction transform of the input data. The modeled inflation patterns in individual slots are then adjusted across the slots in such a way that the overall ISRD in all slot boundaries is minimized. The analysis shows that the stray-light-driven radiometric anomalies can be up to 20% of the normal signals in Bands 6 (680 nm) and 8 (865 nm) of the uncorrected L1B images, and the proposed correction method reduces it to less than 2% in most of the cases, recovering the spatial continuity of natural variability across the slots.