transforming image-objects into multiscale fields: a geobia approach to mitigate urban microclimatic variability within h-res thermal infrared airborne flight-lines

In an effort to minimize complex urban microclimatic variability within high-resolution (H-Res) airborne thermal infrared (TIR) flight-lines, we describe the Thermal Urban Road Normalization (TURN) algorithm, which is based on the idea of pseudo invariant features. By assuming a homogeneous road temperature within a TIR scene, we hypothesize that any variation observed in road temperature is the effect of local microclimatic variability. To model microclimatic variability, we define a road-object class (Road), compute the within-Road temperature variability, sample it at different spatial intervals (i.e., 10, 20, 50, and 100 m) then interpolate samples over each flight-line to create an object-weighted variable temperature field (a TURN-surface). The optimal TURN-surface is then subtracted from the original TIR image, essentially creating a microclimate-free scene. Results at different sampling intervals are assessed based on their: (i) ability to visually and statistically reduce overall scene variability and (ii) computation speed. TURN is evaluated on three non-adjacent TABI-1800 flight-lines (~182 km2) that were acquired in 2012 at night over The City of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. TURN also meets a recent GEOBIA (Geospatial Object Based Image Analysis) challenge by incorporating existing GIS vector objects within the GEOBIA workflow, rather than relying exclusively on segmentation methods.