Evaluation of Four Kernel Driven Models in the Thermal Infrared Band Using Airborne Measured Multi-Angle Datasets

There are four widely-used kernel driven models in the thermal infrared domain, including LSF-Li, RL, Ross-Li and Vinnikov. They have great potentials to achieve the angular effect correction for land surface temperature products. RL and Ross-Li are direct extensions of kernel models in the visible and near infrared region and other two models were directly designed for the thermal infrared region. Their fitting abilities should be evaluated comprehensively at first. Some evaluation works have been reported based on simulated datasets or measured dataset with limited view angles. In this paper, two measured multi-angle datasets with over 104 directions were selected to do evaluation. Both of them were extracted from the airborne measurement using spatial-temporal average method. We found that LSF-Li is always the best one, followed by Ross-Li, RL and Vinnikov.