Dead Pixel Completion of Aqua MODIS Band 6 Using a Robust M-Estimator Multiregression

The Earth Observing System of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration pays a great deal of attention to the long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans. Specifically, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on board the twin satellites Terra and Aqua plays a vital role in the mission. Unfortunately, around 70% of the detectors in Aqua MODIS band 6 have malfunctioned or failed. Consequently, many of the derivatives related to band 6, such as the normalized difference snow index, suffer from the adverse impact of dead or noisy pixels. In this letter, the missing or noisy information in Aqua MODIS band 6 is successfully completed using a robust multilinear regression (M-estimator) based on the spectral relations between working detectors in band 6 and all the other spectra. The experimental results indicate that the proposed robust M-estimator multiregression (RMEMR) algorithm can effectively complete the large areas of missing information while retaining the edges and textures, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.