Cross-Sensor Nighttime Lights Image Calibration for DMSP/OLS and SNPP/VIIRS with Residual U-Net

Dmitry Nechaev, Payne Research Associate Mikhail Zhizhin, Alexey Poyda, Payne Research Associate Tilottama Ghosh, Payne Research Associate Feng-Chi Hsu, and Payne Senior Research Associate, Director of Earth Observation Group Christopher Elvidge write about how remote sensing of nighttime lights (NTL) is widely used in socio-economic studies of economic growth, urbanization, stability of power grid, environmental light pollution, pandemics and military conflicts. Currently, NTL data are collected with two sensors: (1) Operational Line-scan System (OLS) onboard the satellites from the Defense Meteorology Satellite Program (DMSP) and (2) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi NPP (SNPP) and NOAA-20 satellites from the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). However, the nighttime images acquired by these two sensors are incompatible in spatial resolution and dynamic range. To address this problem, we propose a method for the cross-sensor calibration with residual U-net convolutional neural network (CNN).  December 10, 2021.