On calibration of passive optical bathymetry through depth soundings Analysis and treatment of errors resulting from the spatial variation of environmental parameters

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Abstract
Simulations of the radiometric signal extracted from optical imagery of shallow water have been performed in order to investigate the systematic and noise-related bathymetric errors which result from spatial variations in environmental parameters. Inversion techniques which utilize only a few selected depth-sounding points as input permitted the study of these errors as a function of operational and environmental parameters. Rather than attempt to incorporate the environmental spatial variations into a single multi-dimensional bathymetric equation, a spatial iteration procedure preceded by a spectral inversion of the radiometric data is used to eliminate the effects of low frequency environmental parameter variation. Additional investigations have been conducted to evaluate the impact of simply neglecting the infinite-depth radiance, a bathymetric equation parameter which is often impractical to measure or whose estimate entails rather serious simplifying assumptions concerning its spatial variation across the image being processed.