High-Speed Atmospheric Correction Algorithm for Spectral Image Processing

Generating land and ocean data products from NASA multispectral and hyperspectral imagery missions requires atmospheric correction, the removal of atmospheric transmission and scattering effects that contaminate the measurements. This program led by Spectral Sciences, Inc. (SSI) addresses the challenges of high-speed, high-accuracy atmospheric correction for NASA's current (e.g., Hyperion, ALI) and future (e.g., HyspIRI, LDCM) VSWIR spectral imaging instruments through speed, portability and science upgrades to SSI's FLAASH code. Applications include Direct Broadcast of data products generated on board the planned HyspIRI mission, which will avoid the time-consuming bottleneck of hyperspectral image telemetry. By combining FLAASH with a new radiation transport look-up table, and adding geographic information to the metadata stream, a unique, near-real-time capability would be developed and demonstrated on the NASA Elastic Cloud or Infrastructure As A Service. We will also address the issue of in-scene aerosol optical depth variation in atmospheric correction of very large-area images from HyspIRI and other sensors. In Phase II the software would be implemented on a flight processor to prototype HyspIRI Direct Broadcast. The software will be TRL 3 at the contract start; the Phase I product will be TRL 4 for space operation, TRL 5 for ground operation.