A variational approach for the destriping of MODIS data

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) monitors the earth in 36 spectral bands using a cross-track double-sided continuously rotating scan mirror. The imperfect calibration of the linear arrays of detectors and additional random noise in the internal calibration system induce detector-to-detector stripes, mirror side stripes and noisy stripes visible in most emissive bands. This artefact affects seriously the visual quality and radiometric integrity of measured data. Several approaches including fourier filtering [1,2], wavelet analysis [3,4] and statistical techniques such as moment matching or histogram matching have been used to reduce striping on MODIS Data [5,6,7]. Despite an extensive and diverse destriping litterature, most techniques display residual stripes if not strong distortion from the original image. In this paper, we introduce a robust destriping methodology based on a variational approach.