Estimation of City Light Distribution Considering the Pixel-based Distribution of Digital Number Observed in DMSP Night-time Visible Imagery

Abstract

Night-time city light distribution observed by DMSP satellites has been forcused on as a prornising approach to monitor the global human activities. Since its intensity of night-time city light is larger than the upper gain limitation of DMSP visible band sensor, an urbanized area is easily saturated. This make it difficult to estimate basic information required in disaster risk assessment such as distribution of population and social infrastructures in an urbanized area. In this paper, new method to estimate original DN which can be observed if the sensor has infinite width of gain considering the distribution of observed DN was proposed. It was clarified that city light distribution developed by new method successfully reflects unduration of light intensity and population in urbanized area.