Patent ID: 7260242

Claim:
A process for measuring surface reflectance of an object of interest in a set of image data said process comprising the steps of: collect the set of image data which contains the surface reflectance of the object of interest as well as additive noise caused by variations in illumination and an atmospheric effects set; make an estimate of the additive noise in the set of image data; process the image data in a high pass filter to remove the estimate of additive noise from the set of image data and getting thereby a processed image set; use a Discrete Cosign Transform (DCT) on the processed image set to estimate an amount of image signal lost due to the atmospheric effects set; add the estimate of image signal lost to the processed image set to get a sum reflectance estimate; and process the sum reflectance estimate with a multiplicative noise only algorithm to obtain thereby the surface reflectance of the object of interest.