Land cover variation of Minnaert constant for topographic correction of thematic mapper data

Topography affects the surface radiation distribution thus restricting the extraction of thematic information from orbital data. Many models have been proposed to minimize this problem, including the Minnaert model. The variation of Minnaert´s constant - k - was investigated for a tropical region with extreme differences of land cover. A TM Landsat 5 image along with a DEM produced from a contour map at a 1:50,000 scale were used. The results for forest and non-forest areas showed increase on k values from TM1 to TM7 bands as found in the literature. The differences between classes that uses a unique k value in the entire image need to be avoided.