A RADIOMETRIC NORMALIZATION METHOD OF CONTROLLING NO-CHANGED SET (CNCS) FOR DIVERSE LANDCOVER USING MULTI-SENSOR DATA

Abstract. The accurate acquisition of land surface reflectance (SR) data determines the accuracy of ground objects recognition, classification and land surface parameter inversion using remote sensing data, which is the basis of remote sensing data application. In this study, a Control No-Changed Set (CNCS) radiometric normalization method is proposed to realize spectral information transformation of multi-sensor data, which is based on the Iteratively Reweighted Multivariate Alteration Detection (IR-MAD), and includes automatic selection and step-by-step optimization of no-change pixels. The No-Changed set (NC) is obtained by selecting the original no-change pixels between the target image and the reference image according to the linear relationship. In the obtained original no-change regions, IR-MAD rules with iterative control are used to fix the final no-change pixels, after regression modeling and calculation, the normalized images are obtained. The method is tested on multi-images from multi-sensors in three groups of experiments (GF-1 WFV and Landsat-8 OLI, GF-1 PMS and Sentinel-2 MSI, and Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI) with different landcover areas. The results of radiometric normalization are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The data of the three groups of experiments have a high correlation (correlation coefficient r values > 0.85), indicating that they can be used together as complementary data. The Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) values calculate from the NC between the reference and normalized target images are much smaller than those between the reference and original target images. The radiometric colour composition effects, and the typical ground objects spectral reflective curves of the reference and normalized target images are very similar after radiometric normalization. These results indicate that the CNCS method considers the linear relationship of the no-change pixels and is effective, stable, and can be used to improve the consistency of SR of multi-images from multi-sensors.