Hyperspectral flight-line leveling and scattering correction for image mosaics

Commonly there is a need to create a “seamless” mosaic for hyperspectral surveys that include multiple adjacent flight-lines. This is done for both visual continuity and to remove line to line radiometric inconsistencies for subsequent analysis. This paper presents a novel empirical approach to generate image mosaics that is two fold. The first step is to apply a per-pixel scattering correction to adjust for BRDF effects. This correction is based on a vegetation index and the mean reflectance of the image. The second step is a leveling procedure that treats each line equally to derive a band by band correction factor that is weighted based on the scan angle of a given pixel. The results show that the scattering correction combined with the leveling procedure can significantly reduces line to line inconsistencies and produce a high quality mosaic.