An Atmospheric Correction Integrated LULC Segmentation Model for High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Abstract: The integration of fine-scale multispectral imagery with deep learning models has revolutionized land use and land cover (LULC) classification. However, the atmospheric effects present in Top-of-Atmosphere sensor measured Digital Number values must be corrected to retrieve accurate Bottom-of-Atmosphere surface reflectance for reliable analysis. This study employs look-up-table-based radiative transfer simulations to estimate the atmospheric path reflectance and transmittance for atmospherically correcting high-resolution CARTOSAT-3 Multispectral (MX) imagery for several Indian cities. The corrected surface reflectance data were subsequently used in supervised and semi-supervised segmentation models, demonstrating stability in multi-class (buildings, roads, trees and water bodies) LULC segmentation accuracy, particularly in scenarios with sparsely labelled data.