Impact Factor:7.5
DOI number:10.1109/TGRS.2025.3568921
Journal:IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Key Words:Atmospheric correction, nighttime light (NTL) radiative transfer model (RTM) Sustainable Development Goals Science Satellite 1 (SDGSAT-1)
Abstract:Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing data has been widely used in various fields, such as human activity analysis, urbanization studies, and economic evaluation. However, Earth’s nighttime environment is very complex so that the NTL images are seriously affected by atmospheric effect and moonlight. This complexity primarily stems from the numerous atmospheric scattering and absorption, as well as the incoming moonlight, which can significantly distort and contaminate nighttime light observed by the satellite and consequently reduce the precision and stability of NTL data. In order to improve the quantitatively quality of the NTL data, this paper proposes an innovative atmospheric correction algorithm that leverages the nighttime radiative transfer model (nRTM) considering both atmospheric effect and moonlight effect to get ground radiance of artificial lights from satellite nighttime light images. This model takes into account the complex interactions between light and the atmosphere. By simulating these processes, the algorithm is able to separate the contributions of atmospheric scattering and absorption from the original NTL images. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, this paper takes the SDGSAT-1 NTL image of Beijing as a representative case study of atmospheric correction. By comparing the corrected and uncorrected images, it is evident that the atmospheric correction significantly improves the quality of the NTL data and the ground nighttime lighting information becomes clearer and more accurate, effectively removing noise interference and enhancing data reliability. Moreover, it also found that the high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps and LED lamps in the NTL images presented different radiance values and spectral shapes that can be helpful for classifying different lamps.
Indexed by:Journal paper
Document Code:4105016
Discipline:Engineering
First-Level Discipline:Surveying and Mapping
Document Type:J
Volume:63
Translation or Not:no
Included Journals:SCI、EI
Links to published journals:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11000276
First Author:Hongqin Zhang
Correspondence Author:Huazhong Ren
All the Authors:Fengguang Li,Songyi Lin,Hanlin Ye,Chenchen Jiang,Jinshun Zhu,Baozhen Wang
Date of Publication:2025-05-12