AN ALGORITHM FOR GENERATING NATURAL COLOR IMAGES FROM FALSE COLOR USING SPECTRAL TRANSFORMATION TECHNIQUE WITH HIGHER POLYNOMIAL ORDER

Abstract. Satellite imageries in True color composite or Natural Color composite (NCC) serves the best combination for visual interpretation. Red, Green and Infrared channels form false color composite which might not be as useful as NCC to a non-remote sensing professional. As blue band is affected by large atmospheric scattering, satellites like IRS-LISS IV, SPOT do not have blue band. To generate NCC from such satellite data blue band must be simulated. Existing algorithms of spectral transformation do not provide robust coefficients leading to wrong NCC colors especially in water bodies. To achieve more robust coefficients, we have proposed new algorithm to generate NCC for IRS-LISS IV data using second order polynomial regression technique. Second order polynomial transformation functions consider even minor variability present in the image as compared to 1st order so that the derived coefficients are adjustable to accommodate spatial and temporal variability while generating NCC. In this study, Sentinel-2 image was used for deriving coefficients with blue band as dependent and green, red and infrared as independent variables. Simulated Sentinel band showed high accuracy with correlation of 0.93 and 0.97 for two test sites. Using the same coefficients, blue band was simulated for LISS-IV which also showed good correlation of 0.90 with sentinel original blue band. On comparing LISS-IV simulated NCC with simulated NCC from other algorithms, it was observed that higher order polynomial transformation was able to achieve higher accuracy especially for water bodies where expected color is green. Thus, proposed algorithms can be used for transforming false color image to natural color images.