Radiometric Cross-Calibration of GF-4/IRS Based on MODIS Measurements

GaoFen-4 (GF-4) infrared spectrum (IRS) camera has a special spectral band located in the mid-wave infrared spectrum with the wavelength ranging from 3.50 to 4.10 mu m. It is very important for forest fire-detection and other quantitative remote sensing applications at a high spatial resolution of 400 m. Due to the similarity of the spectral characteristics, the thermal emissive band 20 (3.660-3.840 mu m) and 22 (3.929-3.989 mu m) of medium resolution imaging spectrometer (MODIS) are taken as the reference bands for the radiometric cross-calibration of the GF-4/IRS camera. The time difference between selected GF-4/IRS and MODIS images at the Qinghai Lake and Se lincuo Lake test sites is less than one hour. After spatial matching, single-band and dual-band spectral matching methods are proposed in this article. Then, the DN value of GF-4 image is linearly fitted to the radiance of the corresponding MODIS image to obtain the radiometric calibration coefficients of GF-4/IRS camera. The validation results show that the cross-calibration coefficients calculated by integrating the measurement of two MODIS bands with the mean value spectral matching approach has the highest radiometric calibration consistency with the official calibration coefficients.

Automated summary

This article introduces the radiometric cross-calibration method for the GF-4/IRS camera, which involves spectral matching with the thermal emissive bands of MODIS and validation experiments to determine the approach with the highest calibration consistency.