A radiometric evaluation of the Advanced Land Imager

As part of the Earth Observer 1 mission, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) serves as a technology validation instrument that demonstrates potential directions for Landsat-like follow-on imaging systems. To assess the radiometric fidelity of the ALI a radiometric processing system was developed to extract information from virtually every scene that has been captured. The resulting database has provided a wealth of information about system performance in a relatively short period of time. The ALI has exhibited a very stable response with respect to detector gain and bias over short time scales (within a collection period) as well as from orbit-to-orbit and throughout its lifetime. A new approach to detector equalization is presented that is based on scene histogram statistics, along with a proposed metric to quantitatively estimate residual ´striping´. Overall radiometric performance of the instrument is shown to meet or exceed expectations.