Radiometric Calibration for MWIR Cameras

Korean Multi-purpose Satellite-3A (KOMPSAT-3A), which weighing about 1,000 kg is scheduled to be launched in 2013 and will be located at a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) of 530 km in altitude. This is Korea's first satellite to orbit with a mid-wave infrared (MWIR) image sensor, which is currently being developed at Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). The missions envisioned include forest fire surveillance, measurement of the ocean surface temperature, national defense and crop harvest estimate. In this paper, we shall explain the MWIR scene generation software and atmospheric compensation techniques for the infrared (IR) camera that we are currently developing. The MWIR scene generation software we have developed taking into account sky thermal emission, path emission, target emission, sky solar scattering and ground reection based on MODTRAN data. Here, this software will be used for generating the radiation image in the satellite camera which requires an atmospheric compensation algorithm and the validation of the accuracy of the temperature which is obtained in our result. Image visibility restoration algorithm is a method for removing the effect of atmosphere between the camera and an object. This algorithm works between the satellite and the Earth, to predict object temperature noised with the Earth's atmosphere and solar radiation. Commonly, to compensate for the atmospheric effect, some softwares like MODTRAN is used for modeling the atmosphere. Our algorithm doesn't require an additional software to obtain the surface temperature. However, it needs to adjust visibility restoration parameters and the precision of the result still should be studied.