Evaluation of Stray Light Correction for the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) from Landsat 8

Abstract

The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) of Landsat 8 suffers from a stray light issue, where out of field-of-view (FOV) radiance reflects into the optical system and is recorded by the sensors. This is confirmed to be resulting from a defect in hardware of the third order lens. The TIRS-on-TIRS algorithm has been proposed to be an operational correction algorithm. This algorithm has an advantage of simple and easy processing steps. However, no comprehensive evaluation of the TIRS-on-TIRS algorithm has been performed to this point. This thesis addresses a full evaluation of the performance of the algorithm with two datasets; especially associated with two artifacts related to the stray light issue: absolute radiometric error and banding effect. The dataset with truth, MODIS, demonstrates a good performance of the TIRS-on-TIRS algorithm in terms of both absolute radiometric error and the banding effect on all situations except for a higher absolute error for desert scenes after correction. The dataset without truth shows good consistency in terms of absolute radiometric error and no worse performance on the worst situations. Residual pattern error was found with band 11, but almost none in band 10. This should be taken into consideration for further calibration work