Impact of pre-processing and radiometric conversion on data compression onboard a hyperspectral satellite

This paper evaluates the impact of pre-processing and radiometric conversion to radiance on data compression onboard a hyperspectral satellite to examine whether or not they should be applied onboard before compression. Three hyperspectral datacubes acquired using a compact airborne spectrographic imager (cast) flown over crop field for retrieval of leaf area index (LAI) in agriculture applications and one datacube acquired using a Short Wave Infrared Full Spectrum Imager II (SFSI-II) for target detection were tested. Remote sensing applications are used as metrics to evaluate the impact. Double blind test approach was adopted in the evaluation. The evaluation results show that pre-processing and radiometric conversion applied before or after compression has no impact on retrieval of LAI products of the cast datacubes, but has impact on the target detection application of the SFSI-II datacube.