Digital metric camera radiometric and colorimetric calibration with simultaneous CASI imagery to a CIE standard observer based colour space

The Institut Cartografic de Catalunya (ICC) operates a digital metric camera (DMC), manufactured by Z/Imaging. It supports the simultaneous capture of panchromatic, RGB colour and near-infrared images. One of the most important ICC products is the Catalonia orthophotomap series. This product is intended to depict the territory as realistically as possible. With this aim, ICC is developing a project to obtain genuine colours in the photographic products produced with the DMC camera and this paper contains some preliminary results. Since an absolute radiometric calibration of the DMC is not available yet, this is accomplished through simultaneous images acquired with both DMC and a compact airborne spectral imager (CASI) also operated by ICC. These images are used to locate common areas imaged in similar geometrical conditions, and then a linear relationship between digital numbers (DN) from DMC and radiance values of a CASI image emulating DMC bands is calculated. To improve the colour of the DMC products, a colorimetric calibration based on polynomial transformations has been developed. This transformation allows changing from DMC-RGB space to a sRGB space that is based on CIE-XYZ colour space. Airborne ICC-CASI images acquired with a Cessna Caravan B20 over Banyoles (Spain) in 2005 were used to test the methodology. The comparison between the training colours and the ones obtained after colorimetric calibration yield differences in 8 bit DN that range from 4 to 36 DN with a mean value of 12 DN. The effect was also visually analyzed on different subsets of images that include agriculture areas, urban landscape and a natural water layer. Finally, it was found that the application of both calibrations to the DMC images results in a consistent colour combinations for all the analyzed subsets.