Ocean color inversion by particle swarm optimization

Inversion of ocean color reflectance measurements can be cast as an optimization problem, where certain parameters of a forward model are optimized in order to make the forward modelled spectral reflectance match the spectral reflectance of a given in situ sample. A simulated ocean color dataset is used to test the capability of a recently introduced global optimization process, particle swarm optimization (PSO), compared to the more common genetic algorithm technique. On the test data, the PSO method has been shown to outperform the genetic algorithms (GA) in terms of model error. Also important to the ocean color (often remotely sensed) problem is the speed advantage which PSO affords over GA.