Pre-processing of high resolution satellite images for sea bottom classification

In order to monitor the coastal-sea environment it is necessary to check variations of the coastal line as well as the sea bottom. There are techniques for using remote sensing as a technique for the extraction of bathymetric information. However, these techniques require preliminary radiometric image processing in order to fulfill the model constraints. More precisely, atmospheric effects must be removed together with the water column correction in order to achieve radiometric values that are only representative of the sea depth and to homogenize the upwelling response from different bottom types. If sun-glint is present, the effect of the sun beams reflecting on the sea surface, it has to be corrected by a special procedure. This work is concerned with pre-processing the images, via the development of a module in IDL (Interactive Data Language). This module was subsequently embedded in the ENVI menu system. The model was applied to Ikonos and WorldView-2 scenes, representing respectively the Poetto beach near the city of Cagliari and the littoral of Marina di Altidona (the Marches, Italy). The results of pre-processing were evaluated using an unsupervised classification.