Geo-atmospheric processing of airborne imaging spectrometry data. Part 1: Parametric orthorectification

An operational orthorectification solution in support of the combined geometric and radiometric process- ing of currently available imaging spectrometry data is presented. The described parametric geocoding procedure (PARGE) strictly considers the aircraft and terrain geometry parameters and uses a forward transformation algorithm to create orthorectified imaging spectrometry cubes. The implementation princi- ples, the auxiliary data calibration strategies, and the workflow of the currently applied processor are dis- cussed. The major error sources of the approach are identified, and possibilities are shown how to make the most out of the available auxiliary data (INS/GPS) parameters. Results on HyMap and AVIRIS imaging spectrometry data show an absolute accuracy in the range of 1-3 pixels for this kind of imagery. The com- bination of PARGE with an atmospheric correction procedure is shown in part 2 to this paper. The depicted geo-atmospheric workflow is proposed as standard processing approach for available and future imaging spectrometry data.