Assessment of the Radiometric Performance of Chinese HJ-1 Satellite CCD Instruments

Data from the Chinese Huan-Jin (which means “environment”) 1 satellites, HJ-1A and HJ-1B, have been widely used for environmental, disaster monitoring and other applications. However, the radiometric properties of their CCD sensors have not been well assessed. In this study, we evaluated the radiometric performance of the HJ-1A/B CCD sensors by comparing their top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance with those of three other satellite sensors - the Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) because of its long-term stable radiometric calibration, the Earth Observer-1(EO-1) Advanced Land Imager (ALI), and the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) - in four bands from the visible to near infrared spectrum over different landscapes. The results demonstrate that the radiometric performance of the HJ-1A/B CCD sensors is close to that of the Landsat-5 TM, ALI, and ASTER sensors, with the mean R² values ranging from 0.95 to 0.96 (TM), 0.92-0.95 (ALI) and 0.87-0.93 (ASTER), and the mean normalized root mean square error values from 0.05-0.08 (TM), 0.05-0.09 (ALI) and 0.05-0.06 (ASTER). We further assessed the quality of HJ-1 CCD data using four image statistics and found that the image quality is very similar to that of the Landsat-5 TM.