Inversion of top of atmospheric reflectance values by conic multivariate adaptive regression splines

Abstract

Spatial technologies offer high flexibility to handle substantial amount of spatial data and wide range of modelling capabilities. Remotely sensed data are the most significant data source used in spatial technologies. However, it is often associated with uncertainties due to atmospheric effects (i.e. absorption and scattering by atmospheric gases and aerosols). Methods based on rigorous treatment of radiative transfer models still have some drawbacks in the inversion of top of atmospheric reflectance values to surface reflectance values on large numbers of satellite images. In this paper, our aim is to represent a more flexible (adaptive) approach for the regional atmospheric correction by employing nonparametric regression splines within the frame of inverse problems and modern techniques of continuous optimization. To achieve this objective, atmospheric correction models obtained through conic multivariate adaptive regression splines, which is an alternative method to multivariate adaptive regression splines by constructing a penalized residual sum of squares as a Tikhonov regularization problem, are applied on a set of satellite images in order to convert the top of atmospheric reflectance values into surface reflectance values. The results are compared with the ones obtained by both multivariate adaptive regression splines and a radiative transfer-based method.