Real-Time Atmospheric Correction of AVIRIS-NG Imagery

We demonstrate real-time model-based atmospheric correction onboard the Next Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer. We achieve a reduction in processing time from hours or days to seconds by modifying a standard physics-based atmospheric correction algorithm to support real-time execution. We achieved this reduction by modifying the physics-based ATmospheric REMoval algorithm to leverage a large lookup table of precomputed scattering and transmission coefficients, indexed by parameters specifying the aircraft operating conditions at capture time. Interpolation among the precomputed coefficients allows surface reflectance retrieval at the sensor acquisition rate of 500 Mb/s. Our system produced science-quality reflectance products during over 30 test flights and, to our knowledge, is the first reported demonstration of real-time model-driven visible shortwave infrared atmospheric correction onboard an aircraft.