I'm happy to announce the next big release of the EOMasters Toolbox Pro only 4 months after the first release. Considering the new features, it should be a version 2.0. For several reasons I stick to 1.2. This version has some nice new features for you. At least if you are a Sentinel-2 user and I'm sure you are. But there is also a reader for ASTER data. I hope you like them as much as I do. Unfortunately for you, I had to increase the price for the plugin. But it is still a fair and reasonable price. The new price is now at 45€ and you can get it in the EOMasters Shop. And still, you can use the trial phase to test the plugin.
S2 Surface Reflectance Normalisation
The new processor uses the c-factor method to produce Nadir BRDF Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR). The c-factor method (Roy et al.) adjusts measured surface reflectance using the MODIS BRDF model. Normalised SR ensure reliable comparison of images over time and under different conditions. This method also considers the detector footprints for azimuth and zenith angles. There are other implementations which are doing a surface reflectance normalisation using the c-factor method, but those I found (SEN2NBAR, SentinelHub) don't use the detector footprints.
More information about the normalisation can be found in the separate EOMasters Blog: Normalisation of Surface Reflectance for Sentinel-2
S2 View Geometry Upscaling
The view and sun geometry angles of the taken imagery is important in many Earth observation applications, such as atmospheric correction and surface reflectance normalization. For Sentinel-2 data, these angles are stored on a 23x23 grid with a ground resolution of 5000m. The EOMasters Toolbox Pro for ESA's SNAP now includes a special up-scaling process for these geometry angles, allowing for accurate scaling without resampling the product to a common resolution.
The above two new features support standard Sentinel-2 L1C and/or L2A data. L2A data from Theia in Muscate format is currently not supported. For Theia data the detector footprints are only provided per resolution but are actually different for each band. That's why the viewing geometries cannot be correctly calculated. This has been reported to the Maja team.
The S2 L2A product provides the B1 reflectance data at an up-sampled resolution of 20m and the specific masks, like detector footprints, still at the native resolution of 60m. Due to this incompatibility and the reason that SNAP is not correcting this, the view geometry information of B1 is not usable. You might want to read the discussions I had about this issue.
More information about the geometry upscaling can be found in the separate EOMasters Blog: Sentinel-2 Geometry Up-scaling
Super-Resolve S2 Data to Five Meters
Traditional up-scaling methods like bilinear or bicubic interpolation often fall short in preserving intricate features and textures. In contrast, deep learning models offer significant advantages, such as better feature preservation, sharper edges, and adaptive learning capabilities. The EOMasters Toolbox Pro includes a super-resolution plugin that increases the resolution of the 10- and 20-meter bands to 5 meters, with the option to resample 60-meter bands using bicubic interpolation. The process can make use of the GPU to significantly improve the performance. In the target product the geometry and other ancillary bands can be included which will appropriately be up scaled.
You can read more details about the up-scaling process in the separate EOMasters Blog: Super-Resolution of Sentinel-2 Imagery
ASTER L1T Reader
A reader for ASTER data has been added to the toolbox. The reader supports ASTER (L1T) Level 1 Precision Terrain Corrected Registered At-Sensor Radiance of collection version '003' and '031'. VNIR, SWIR, and TIR data bands are read if they are available, and the raw digital number are scaled to radiance values.
ASTER L1T data can be downloaded from NASA EarthData.
But you should be careful when saving the data to another format. Cause of a bug in SNAP the tie-points are not correctly stored when using BEAM-DIMAP or the ZNAP format.
More details about the individual features, will be posted in the coming days or is available on the respective help pages.
The EOMasters Toolbox Pro is available in the EOMasters Shop. You can activate a trial version when installing the plugin in SNAP. Simply request the trial key and decide after the trial period if you want to buy it.
Tschüss & Goodbye
Marco