News and Press Releases

Archived News Alerts

January 19th, 2010:

PARGE version 3.0 has been released. Updates and new features:

• Revised and extended internal data structure to allow more consistent data logging and batch processing,
• Introduced method for orthorectification to ENVI-compatible rotated geometry to reduce output data size substantially,
• Substantially reduced memory demand for nearest neighbour processing in IGM workflow by full tiling capabilities,
• Introduced build number display and personal preferences,
• restructured the help menu and updated the user manual, and
• added a result definition panel.

January 12th, 2010:

ATCOR 2/3, version 7.1 and ATCOR 4, version 5.1 have been released. Updates and new features:

• The set of haze termination criteria is augmented. This improves the performance of batch jobs to terminate the haze removal if the haze option is set, and if the haze removal is probably not successful.
• Cloud shadow is included as an additional class in the ”scene out hcw.bsq” file containing haze, cloud, water, land, snow, and saturated pixels.
• The ”scene atm.log” file includes the percentage of cloud cover, cloud shadow, water, and snow.
• An optional new quality file is added to the output. The previous hcw file is created if the corresponding flag in the preference parameter file is set to 1. If the flag is set to 2, this quality file ”scene quality.bsq” is created additionally. Currently, it consists of three bands with a probability map for cloud, water, and snow, and there are three probability levels (low, medium, high, coded 30, 60, 90, respectively). More quality indicators for other classes might be added in future releases.
• Start/stop wavelengths for interpolation in the 940, 1130, 1400, 1900 nm regions can now be defined for hyperspectral instruments. The previous version employed fixed settings. Now there is more flexibility in the definition of those interpolation regions.
• The file extension ’.ini’ is changed into ’.inn’ to avoid conflicts in Windows operating systems. Old ’ini’ files are still valid, but will automatically be copied to the corresponding ’.inn’ file.
• If the ’gain setting’ parameter (line 6 of the ”sensor*.dat” file) is set to 1, then the gainset=g value (line 5 of the ’.inn’ file) is used to update the radiometric calibration c1 with c1/g, where g is the same for all channels. This feature is convenient if the basic calibration c1 applies but a common re-scaling factor is sufficient, e.g. due to a change of the system integration time. In these cases, the same radiometric calibration file (”*.cal”) can be used, and only factor g is updated in the ’.inn’ file. In the past, gain setting was also supported: a vector of re-scaling factors was accepted (on line 5 of the ’.inn’ file), but only up to 10 channels. In general, we have g=1.0 and the complete radiometric calibration is provided in the ”.cal” file.
• The spatially varying visibility mode now employs a finer aerosol optical thickness grid of 0.006 in the visibility index (visindex) file instead of the former 0.01. In addition, the visindex file now has only one channel, the second channel that included the haze / cloud classification is omitted. The haze/cloud mask can be found in the ”* hcw.bsq” file (haze, cloud, water, land). The haze / cloud classification is also removed from the aerosol optical thickness (AOT) file (”* atm aot.bsq”).
• The algorithms and output messages for the buttons ”Aerosol Type” and ”Visib. Estimate” are improved. ”Aerosol Type” works only with DDV pixels, while ”Visib. Estimate” consists of three steps: (a) DDV pixels (red band), (b) non DDV but dark pixels (red band), and (c) water pixels (NIR band). The previous version tended to overestimate the visibility for scenes with water bodies.
• For pushbroom imaging spectrometers the spectral ”smile” effect often needs to be corrected. This optical aberration causes the spectrometer entrance slit to be projected as a curve on the rectilinear detector array. The shift of the center wavelength of a channel in across- track direction is specified as a 4th order polynomial function. A tool was provided by ReSe to calculate this polynomial from image data for a set of channels located in atmospheric absorption regions.
• A change in the file format of the 4th order smile polynomial coefficients was necessary. While the previous format (”smile poly ord4.dat”) had 5 columns for the polynomial coefficients,the new format requires 6 columns with the wavelength or band number in the first column followed by the five polynomial coefficients.
• The calculation of cast shadows has been significantly improved by allowing sub-pixel terrain analysis (avoiding linear artefacts due to pixel resolution).

• The monochromatic atmospheric database contains new look-up tables for a minimum flight altitude of 100 m above sea level. With the previous versions the minimum altitude LUTs were calculated for a flight level of 1 km, and LUTs for flight altitudes below 1 km were extrapolated using the 1 km and 2 km LUTs. Now the LUTs for flight altitudes below 1 km can be calculated more accurately using interpolation. Note: to comply with the 1000 m grid of the database file names, the names of the 100 m LUTs are listed as height 0.
• The creation of scan angle files from parameter is now consistent with the image data formats.

October 12th 2009:

SpecTIR Announces Exclusive Delivery of 5 nm Hyperspectral Reflectance Data using ATCOR-4 Atmospheric Modeling Software.

SpecTIR (Reno, NV) announces that it has incorporated ATCOR-4 software into the processing of airborne hyperspectral data from radiance to reflectance files, and is the only commercial firm to deliver 5 nanometer (nm) reflectance files. ATCOR-4 originates from the German Aerospace Center and is available through ReSe Applications Schläpfer. It is used to make atmospheric corrections to the hyperspectral data and produces 5 nm spectral channels. Previously, 10 nm reflectance channels were the best resolution available to the remote sensing industry. The ATCOR-4 software is used to correct small and wide FOV airborne reflective and emissive systems. It derives surface reflectance, emissivity, and temperature from calibrated images by atmospheric correction. This information can be used for monitoring, change detection, surface-vegetation atmosphere transfer (SVAT) modeling, and surface energy balance investigations for modeling. SpecTIR’s President, Mark Landers, said “This is a significant step in our ability to understand and model hyperspectral data. We are now the only firm able to provide clients with 5 nm atmospherically corrected reflectance files, which is a much richer data source, and ultimately a superior product for exploitation and analysis.”

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