Estimation of AOD under uncertainty: An approach for Hyperspectral Airborne data

A key parameter for atmospheric correction (AC) is Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), which is often estimated from sensor radiance (L_rs,t(λ)). Noise, the dependency on surface type, viewing and illumination geometry cause uncertainty in AOD inference.We propose a method that determines pre-estimates of surface reflectance (ρ_t,pre) where effects associated with L_rs,t(λ) are less influential. The method identifies pixels comprising pure materials from ρ_t,pre. AOD values at the pure pixels are iteratively estimated using l₂-norm optimization. Using the adjacency range function, the AOD is estimated at each pixel. We applied the method on Hyperspectral Mapper and Airborne Prism Experiment instruments for experiments on synthetic data and on real data. To simulate real imaging conditions, noise was added to the data. The estimation error of the AOD is minimized to 0.06-0.08 with a signal-to-reconstruction-error equal to 35 dB. We compared the proposed method with a dense dark vegetation (DDV)-based state-of-the-art method. This reference method, resulted in a larger variability in AOD estimates resulting in low signal-to-reconstruction-error between 5-10 dB. For per-pixel estimation of AOD, the performance of the reference method further degraded. We conclude that the proposed method is more precise than the DDV methods and can be extended to other AC parameters.