This paper shows a way to use a general digital camera as a multi spectral camera. The purposes of this development are cost reduction and simplified processing for the spectroscopic measurement. It is necessary for obtainning radiance in each pixel to know the camera’s sensitivity and spectral response. So authors used a camera which can store images as RAW format in this study. Authors estimated the camera’s RGB-sensitibities and RGB-responses based on discrete expression of RGB-responses, approximation of RGB- sensitivities and exposure relationship and simultaneous estimation scheme of sensitivity and response. So authors have been able to compute incident radiance from a RGB pixel value with 8bit accuracy. Also in this paper, authors developed the spectral response dividing method with a long-pass filter. As a primary application of this method, radiance based NDVI and red edge information can be estimated. The NDVI or red edge image is made from an image taken by a digital camera which has sensitivity in the near infrared spectrum. This image is validated by simultaneously measured radiance with a spectroradiometer.

Date Published: 21 November 2012
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8524, Land Surface Remote Sensing, 85241Y (21 November 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.977211

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8524:
Land Surface Remote Sensing
Dara Entekhabi; Yoshiaki Honda; Haruo Sawada; Jiancheng Shi; Taikan Oki, Editor(s)