Removing Sun Glint from Optical Satellite Images of the Shallow Water Areas around Islands in the Spratly Islands Archipelago

Abstract

Remote sensing technology has an important role to provide information for the
establishment of habitat and bathymetry maps in shallow water areas. However, sun glint on the water
surface has changed spectral reflectance in body water recorded by the sensor, thus seriously distorting
water column and benthic properties. So, the sun glint should be removed prior to image analysis to
improve the accuracy. This study aims to remove the sun glint from Sentinel-2 multi-spectral satellite
images by two common methods of Lyzenga and Hedley for shallow waters in the surrounding areas
of the Spratly islands archipelago. The experimental results were evaluated by spectrographic
comparison after calibration by the two methods. In addition, the efficiency of the two methods was
clearly shown in the application of depth estimation using the Lyzenga method for image data at two
points. The result increases the R2 correlation coefficient and decreases the root-mean-square RMSE
of the model estimate of the significant amount of depth after calibration.
Keywords

Bathymetry, Sentinel-2, Landsat-8, Sun glint, Spratly islands archipelago

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