Validation of landsat-8 OLI image simulation

Simulated remote sensing imagery is valuable for instrument design studies, analysis algorithm development and validation, as well as analyst training. The Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) suite of software is an image simulation tool developed by the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing (DIRS) Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology. DIRSIG has a long history of supporting sensor design. In this paper simulated Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery generated with DIRSIG is validated by comparison of several metrics with those obtained from analysis of real Landsat-8 OLI imagery. Comparison metrics include the data covariance matrix eigenstructure, supervised classification accuracies and NDVI product values. The results show that when evaluated by these comparison metrics the simulated imagery captures the key characteristics of images for a variety of scenes.