A new metodology for the in-flight radiometric calibration of the MIVIS imaging sensor

Sensor radiometric calibration is of great importance in computing physical values of radiance of the investigated targets, but often airborne scanners are not equipped with any in-flight radiometric calibration facility. Consequently, the radiometric calibration or airborne systems usually relies only on pre-flight and vicarious calibration or on indirect approaches. This paper introduces an experimental approach that makes use of on-board calibration techniques to perform the radiometric calibration of the CNR’s MIVIS (Multispectral Infrared and Visible Imaging Spectrometer) airborne scanner. This approach relies on the use of an experimental optical test bench originally designed at Politecnico di Milano University (Italy), called MIVIS Flying Test Bench (MFTB), to perform the first on-the-fly (OTF) calibration of the MIVIS reflective spectral bands. The main task of this study is to estimate how large are the effects introduced by aircraft motion (e.g., e.m. noise or vibrations) and by environment conditions (e.g. environment temperature) on the radiance values measured by the MIVIS sensor during the fly. This paper describes the first attempt to perform an on-the-fly (OTF) calibration of the MIVIS reflective spectral bands (ranging from 430 nm to 2,500 nm). Analysis of results seems to point out limitations of traditional radiometric calibration methodology based only on pre-flight approaches, with important implications for data quality assessment.