Spectral Calibration of Hyperspectral Data Observed From a Hyperspectrometer Loaded on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platform

Hyperspectral imaging has been widely applied in remote sensing scientific fields. For this study, hyperspectral imaging data covering the spectral region from 400 to 1000 nm were collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle visible/near-infrared imaging hyperspectrometer (UAV-VNIRIS). Theoretically, the spectral calibration parameters of the UAV-VNIRIS measured in the laboratory should be refined when applied to the hyperspectral data obtained from the UAV platform due to variations between the laboratory and actual flight environments. Therefore, accurate spectral calibration of the UAV-VNIRIS is essential to further applications of the hyperspectral data. Shifts in both the spectral center wavelength position and the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) were retrieved using two different methods (Methods I and II) based on spectrum matching of atmospheric absorption features at oxygen bands near 760 nm and water vapor bands near 820 and 940 nm. Comparison of the spectral calibration results of these two methods over the calibration targets showed that the derived center wavelength and FWHM shifts are similar. For the UAV-VNIRIS observed data used here, the shifts in center wavelength derived from both Methods I and II over the three absorption bands are less than 0.13 nm, and less than 0.22 nm in terms of FWHM. The findings of this paper revealed: 1) the UAV-VNIRIS payload on the UAV platform performed well in terms of spectral calibration; and 2) the applied methods are effective for on-orbit spectral calibration of the hyper spectrometer.