Marine Science Faculty Publications
Geometric Accuracy of Remote Sensing Images over Oceans: The use of Global Offshore Platforms
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2019
Keywords
Landsat, Remote sensing images, Geometric accuracy, Offshore platforms, Ground control points
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.01.002
Abstract
The geometric accuracy of tens of millions of scenes of medium-resolution remote sensing (RS) images collected in the past 45 years has been systematically evaluated for land scenes, but the accuracy of ocean scenes is poorly known due to the lack of ground control points (GCPs). In this study, the locations of offshore platforms are first derived from time-series of Landsat-8 OLI images, and are then used as offshore reference points to systematically assess the geometric performance of RS images covering offshore oil/gas development areas. An inventory of 16,131 offshore platforms at the global scale is established, and then a novel method using the position-invariant characteristic of offshore platforms and the coherent characteristic of the geometric shift among tie-points (i.e. between sensed points from to-be-assessed images and the corresponding OLI-derived reference points) is developed for assessing the geometric accuracy of Landsat and other RS images. The method has been applied to 112,935 Landsat scenes (~1.87% of the entire archive) over oceans. The results indicate an optimal performance of Landsat OLI images (both pre-collection and Collection-1) but a less reliable performance of Landsat TM/ETM+ L1TP images. Approximately 50% of TM L1GS and ETM+ L1GT images have at least 2 pixels of geometric error. The new reference points inventory and the developed method were also applied to many other low-resolution and finer-resolution imagery (e.g. VIIRS Night-fire product, Terra/Aqua MODIS active fire product, ENVISAT ASAR, ALOS-1 PALSAR, Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 MSI, the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial images, and images from several Chinese satellites), and a quantitative description of the geometric accuracy of these sensors is also presented. The findings suggest that the new offshore reference point inventory is probably useful to help establish more robust offshore GCPs for U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) GCP library and further improve the ongoing USGS Global GCP improvement plan and European Space Agency Global Reference Image plan.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Remote Sensing of Environment, v. 222, p. 244-266
Scholar Commons Citation
Liu, Yongxue; Hu, Chuanmin; Dong, Yanzhu; Xu, Bihua; Zhan, Wenfeng; and Sun, Chao, "Geometric Accuracy of Remote Sensing Images over Oceans: The use of Global Offshore Platforms" (2019). Marine Science Faculty Publications. 2003.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/msc_facpub/2003
