Characterization of the sources of degradation in remote sensing satellite images

Remote sensing images are formed by the acquisition of the electromagnetic energy reflected or emitted from an object under observation using an optical system. During this process the acquired data is lost due to several degradation effects including atmospheric turbulence, relative motion between observed object and sensor, and lenses-of-focus, hence causing severe blurring in satellite digital images. This blurring effect can be mathematically modeled using point spread function in the image’s spatial domain, or equivalently using the optical transfer function in the image’s frequency domain. The degree of spreading blurring of the point object is a measure of the quality of an imaging system. The key result of this paper is investigating the main sources of image degradation and modeling their effects on the quality of images acquired by remote sensing satellite systems.