200 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 46, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008
A Neural Network Technique for Separating
Land Surface Emissivity and Temperature
From ASTER Imagery
Kebiao Mao, Jiancheng Shi, Senior Member, IEEE, Huajun Tang, Zhao-Liang Li,
Xiufeng Wang, and Kun-Shan Chen, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Four radiative transfer equations for Advanced
Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer
(ASTER) bands 11, 12, 13, and 14 are built involving six unknowns
(average atmospheric temperature, land surface temperature, and
four band emissivities), which is a typical ill-posed problem. The
extra equations can be built by using linear or nonlinear relation-
ship between neighbor band emissivities because the emissivity of
every land surface type is almost constant for bands 11, 12, 13,
and 14. The neural network (NN) can make full use of potential
information between band emissivities through training data be-
cause the NN simultaneously owns function approximation, clas-
sification, optimization computation, and self-study ability. The
training database can be built through simulation by MODTRAN4
or can be obtained from the reliable measured data. The average
accuracy of the land surface temperature is about 0.24 K, and
the average accuracy of emissivity in bands 11, 12, 13, and 14
is under 0.005 for test data. The retrieval result by the NN is,
on average, higher by about 0.7 K than the ASTER standard
product (AST08), and the application and comparison indicated
that the retrieval result is better than the ASTER standard data
product. To further evaluate self-study of the NN, the ASTER
standard products are assumed as measured data. After using
Manuscript received January 2, 2007; revised May 23, 2007. The work was
supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China under Grants
90302008 and 40571101, by the Central Scientific Research Institution for
Public Welfare through the Special Fund for Basic Research Work, by the
project 863 of China under Grants 2006AA10Z241, and by the Ministry of
Agriculture through the Open Fund of the Key Laboratory of Resource Remote
Sensing and Digital Agriculture.
K. Mao was with the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science,
jointly sponsored by the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100101,
China, and also with the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100049, China. He is now with the Key Laboratory of Resources
Remote Sensing and Digital Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture, Hulunber
Grassland Ecosystem Observation and Research Station, Institute of Agri-
cultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural
Sciences, Beijing 100081, China (e-mail: kebiaomao2004@hotmail.com).
J. Shi is with the Institute for Computational Earth System Science, Univer-
sity of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA.
H. Tang is with the Key Laboratory of Resources Remote Sensing and Digital
Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture, Hulunber Grassland Ecosystem Obser-
vation and Research Station, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional
Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China.
Z.-L. Li is with the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources
Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China, and also
with the Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Image, de l’Informatique et de la
Teledetection (UMR7005), 67412 Illkirch, France.
X. Wang is with the Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University,
Sapporo 060-8589, Japan.
K.-S. Chen is with Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National
Central University, Chungli 320, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2007.907333
AST09, AST08, and AST05 (ASTER Standard Data Product) as
the compensating training data, the average relative error of the
land surface temperature is under 0.1 K relative to the AST08
product, and the average relative error of the emissivity in bands
11, 12, 13, and 14 is under 0.001 relative to AST05, which indicates
that the NN owns a powerful self-study ability and is capable
of suiting more conditions if more reliable and high-accuracy
ASTER standard products can be compensated.
Index Terms—Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and
Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data, emissivity, land surface
temperature (LST).
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Re-
flection Radiometer (ASTER) is an imaging instrument
aboard the Terra satellite, which was launched in December
1999 as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Admin-
istration’s (NASA’s) Earth Observing System (EOS). ASTER
has 15 bands, which cover the visible, near-infrared, short-wave
infrared, and thermal infrared regions, and the spatial resolution
is from 15 to 90 m. It is mainly used to obtain detailed maps
of land surface temperature (LST), emissivity, reflectance, and
elevation [1].
Many methods have been developed to retrieve the sea sur-
face temperature and the LST from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Advanced Very High
Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data [2]–[17]. The study
of algorithms for retrieving the LST and emissivity from high-
resolution thermal images (like ASTER) is not too much [1],
[18]–[21] because it is difficult to obtain the atmospheric pa-
rameters (like water vapor content).
The retrieval of land surface emissivity and temperature is
a typical ill-posed problem in geophysical parameter retrieval
because the number of unknown parameters is always at least
one more than the number of simultaneous equations that are
available for solution. It is very difficult to exactly separate land
surface emissivity and temperature from thermal radiance mea-
surement if we do not utilize some prior knowledge. Many peo-
ple [1], [10], [13], [16], [18], [20]–[29] made a lot of research
for the separation of land surface emissivity and temperature.
The detailed introduction for different LST/emissivity separa-
tion algorithms has been well discussed by Li and Becker [10]
and Gillespie et al. [1]. Three algorithms of them [1], [10],
[13] are widely used in application. Li and Becker [10] and
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