Atmospheric Compensation using a Geometrically-Compensated Empirical Line Method

This paper presents a geometric extension to the well known Empirical Line Method (ELM) for atmospheric compensation, enabling improved results through the use of 3D scene geometry. Typically, this geometry is assumed to be known, either through direct measurement or analysis of other imagery such as lidar or photogrammetric products. However, when the scene geometry is unknown and only spectral information is available, in certain cases estimates of the surface orientation may be obtained directly from image brightness values. In this paper we derive a means to determine surface orientation estimates from a pair of brightness images, and then use this geometric information to improve the ELM solution.