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Preliminary assessment of the geometric improvements to the Landsat Collection-2 archive

Mark Lubke·Rajagopalan Rengarajan·Michael J. Choate
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Abstract

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has completed processing of the historical Landsat archive to Collection-2 as of December of 2020 and has released it to the public. As part of Collection-2, several geometric changes have been implemented, including changes to the ground control points (GCPs) and elevation datasets. These datasets are used as a geometric reference for all missions. In addition, mission specific improvements were included in Collection-2, such as improvements to the precision correction algorithms and updates of the calibration parameters. This paper discusses a preliminary analysis of a comparison between the Collection-1 and Collection-2 products of the entire Landsat archive. Compared to the Level 1 products in Collection-1, the number of Tier-1 precision- and terrain-corrected (L1TP) Level 1 products in Collection-2 increased by 6.26% across all sensors. Landsat 8 products showed an increase of Tier-1 L1TP products by 5.33%; Landsat 7 products showed an increase of Tier-1 products by 6.94%; and Landsat 5 and Landsat 4 Thematic Mapper (TM) products showed an increase of Tier-1 products by 9.35%. The geometric accuracy of the Tier-1 terrain corrected products also improved by 2 meters or more.

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Mark Lubke, Rajagopalan Rengarajan, Michael J. Choate. 2021. Preliminary assessment of the geometric improvements to the Landsat Collection-2 archive. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2596200

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