Atmospheric correction of satellite images over rugged terrain

Without accurate correction of atmospheric and illumination effects, we cannot obtain physical quantity such as surface reflectance on the earth from satellite imagery. This paper proposes a new method for correcting the atmospheric effects, which variate not only horizontally but also vertically. First, classes are identified using illumination condition and infrared bands which are less influenced by atmospheric scattering than visible bands. Elevation dependency of the values in a visible band in the same class are calculated as a horizontally distributed haze index. After being smoothed by a spatial median filter, the haze index is used for the atmospheric correction. Simple but physically reasonable illumination correction is applied to various satellite images to show the effectiveness of the method.