Radiometric calibration of frame transfer CCD camera with uniform source system

This paper presents a radiometric calibration method based on visibility function and uniform source system. The uniform system is mainly comprised of an integrating sphere and a monitoring silicon detector. The current of the silicon detector with a visibility function filter corresponds to the luminance at the exit port of integrating sphere through standard luminance meter transfer. The radiance at the camera entrance pupil is calculated for different solar zenith angles and Earth surface albedos by the MODTRAN atmospheric code. To simplify the calibration process, the radiance at its entrance pupil is integrated by visibility function. The shift smear of the frame transfer CCD is removed by the radiometric calibration and the amending ratio factor is introduced in the retrieving methods. The imaging experiment verifies the reliability of the calibration method and retrieves good quality image.