Performance of atmospheric and topographic correction methods on Landsat imagery in mountain areas

An effective removal of atmospheric and topographic effects on remote-sensing imagery is an essential preprocessing step for mapping land cover accurately in mountain areas. Various techniques that remove these effects have been proposed and consist of specific combinations of an atmospheric and a topographic correction (TC) method. However, it is possible to generate a wide range of new combined correction methods by applying alternative combinations of atmospheric and TC methods. At present, a systematic overview of the statistical performance and data input requirement of preprocessing techniques is missing. In order to assess the individual and combined impacts of atmospheric and TC methods, 15 permutations of two atmospheric and/or four TC methods were evaluated statistically and compared to the uncorrected imagery. Furthermore, results of the integrated ATCOR3 method were included. This evaluation was performed in a study area in the Romanian Carpathian mountains. Results showed that the combination of a transmittance-based atmospheric correction (AC), which corrects the effects of Rayleigh scattering and water-vapour absorption, and a pixel-based C or Minnaert TC, which account for diffuse sky irradiance, reduced the image distortions most efficiently. Overall results indicated that TC had a larger impact than AC and there was a trade-off between the statistical performance of preprocessing techniques and their data requirement. However, the normalized difference vegetation index analysis indicated that atmospheric methods resulted in a larger impact on the spectral information in bands 3 and 4.