Students of the Krasnoyarsk Reshetnev Siberian State University have created a software package for automatic correction of satellite images, which improves the accuracy of remote sensing data of the Earth in ecology, agriculture and urban planning, TASS was told in the press service of the university. The development takes into account the slope of the surface and the position of the Sun, correcting distortions in images, due to which some areas appear too bright, while others appear dark.
The tool is based on the C-correction method — radiometric topographic normalization of images. It neutralizes the influence of the relief on the brightness of objects: for example, a forest on a lighted mountainside looks lighter than in the shade, and C-correction evens out these differences, creating the illusion of a flat surface.
The development was carried out by students under the guidance of Igor Babiy, assistant at the Department of Space Vehicles and Technologies, who explained that the insufficient accuracy of images due to the relief remains an unresolved problem in geoinformatics. According to him, the new tool allows you to obtain "clean" data on the state of vegetation, soil and urban development, improving the monitoring of forests and agricultural land, assessing the consequences of fires and floods, as well as planning land use and urban development.
The university's press service noted that the software module performs topographic normalization automatically. The method mathematically compensates for the influence of the angle of inclination of the surface and solar illumination, bringing the brightness of pixels to hypothetical conditions of a horizontal plane. This simplifies the automated interpretation of remote sensing data and improves the accuracy of analysis in environmental monitoring, forestry, agriculture and urban planning.