A pragmatic scheme of SNR estimation for optical remote sensing images

Signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of optical remote sensing images with different intensity levels are different, and they can not be directly compared with each other. It is necessary to develop a scheme to deal with this problem on SNR estimation of optical remote sensing images. Radiance is a good parameter as the basis for comparison. Under the same radiance, comparisons between SNRs derived from different images are feasible and reasonable. The result of SNR at specific radiance level can stably reflect actual SNR performance variation of the dedicated remote sensor. So this paper presents a pragmatic scheme of SNR estimation (PSSNRE) for optical remote sensing images, and applies it to estimate the SNRs of two SPOT5 images acquired in different years. The estimated SNRs based on the PSSNRE are very close to statistic SNR values given by SPOT official. It indicates that the PSSNRE can produce rational SNR assessment.