A General Relative Radiometric Correction Method for Vignetting Noise Drift

Abstract

Due to the limitation of the number of sensor pixels, optical splicing is commonly used to improve the imaging width of remote sensing satellites, and this optical stitching can cause vignetting in the image data of adjacent sensors. The weak energy, low signal-to-noise ratio, and poor response stability of vignetting are key factors that restrict the relative radiometric correction of optical splicing remote satellites. This paper proposes a stability analysis method and a relative radiometric correction method for vignetting. First, we analyzed the stability of the response and the noise impact of vignetting. Massive data from the Jilin-1 GF03D satellites was used to analyze the stability of the response using the vignetting stability analysis method. Secondly, the data on the deep sea during nighttime (DDSN) of Jilin-1 GF03D satellites was used to obtain the characteristics of the sensors’ noise. Thirdly, by building a noise drift model, we calculated the coefficient of the noise drift according to its characteristics. Using the coefficient to eliminate the noise drift of each pixel in vignetting can improve the response stability of vignetting. The average response stability increased by 37.64% by this method. Finally, the automatic relative radiometric correction method was completed through histogram matching. Furthermore, we proposed color aberration metrics (CAMs) to evaluate the multi-spectral images after relative radiometric correction, and massive data from the 16 satellites of Jilin-1 GF03D was used to verify the effectiveness and generality. The experimental results show that the average CAM of the images increased by 15.97% using the proposed method compared to the traditional method.