Geometric accuracy of remote sensing images over oceans: The use of global offshore platforms

The geometric accuracy of tens of millions of scenes of medium-resolution remote sensing (RS) images collected in the past 45 years has been systematically evaluated for land scenes, but the accuracy of ocean scenes is poorly known due to the lack of ground control points (GCPs). In this study, the locations of offshore platforms are first derived from time-series of Landsat-8 OLI images, and are then used as offshore reference points to systematically assess the geometric performance of RS images covering offshore oil/gas development areas. An inventory of 16,131 offshore platforms at the global scale is established, and then a novel method using the position-invariant characteristic of offshore platforms and the coherent characteristic of the geometric shift among tie-points (i.e. between sensed points from to-be-assessed images and the corresponding OLI-derived reference points) is developed for assessing the geometric accuracy of Landsat and other RS images. The method has been applied to 112,935 Landsat scenes (similar to 1.87% of the entire archive) over oceans. The results indicate an optimal performance of Landsat OLI images (both pre-collection and Collection-1) but a less reliable performance of Landsat TM/ETM + L1TP images. Approximately 50% of TM L1GS and ETM + L1GT images have at least 2 pixels of geometric error. The new reference points inventory and the developed method were also applied to many other low-resolution and finer-resolution imagery (e.g. VIIRS Night-fire product, Terra/Aqua MODIS active fire product, ENVISAT ASAR, ALOS-1 PALSAR, Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 MSI, the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial images, and images from several Chinese satellites), and a quantitative description of the geometric accuracy of these sensors is also presented. The findings suggest that the new offshore reference point inventory is probably useful to help establish more robust offshore GCPs for U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) GCP library and further improve the ongoing USGS Global GCP improvement plan and European Space Agency Global Reference Image plan.