Abstract
In rugged terrain, a digital number of satellite data is highly correlated with direct solar irradiation, which is propotional to the cosine of solar incident angle. The direct solar irradiation can be calculated with high geometrical accuracy by using a digital elevation model and the solar position. In this paper, we propose to use the calculated direct solar irradiation to determine ground control points (GCPs) for precise geometrical correction of the satellite imagery. The proposed method is applied to an actual Landsat/TM image to show its effectiveness.
