The radiosity method in optical remote sensing of structured 3-D surfaces

Optical properties of canopies of the tropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum estimated by a three‐dimensional radiative transfer model

“…In a plane-parallel configuration the algorithm produces estimations of directional radiance almost identical to numerical integration solutions such as those implemented in the commercial software Hydrolight (Mobley and Sundman 2000;Hedley 2008). Global illumination models have been previously applied to terrestrial vegetative canopies for applications in remote sensing and computer graphics (Borel et al 1991;Soler et al 2003), but to our knowledge this is the first application in an aquatic canopy. Since the full mathematical description of the model is substantial, further details are not given here but are in Hedley (2008).…”

The cause of the hot spot in vegetation canopies and soils: Shadow-hiding versus coherent backscatter

“…However, after the soil was allowed to dry it exhibited coherent backscatter. The preliminary results of this paper imply that current hot spot models that invoke shadow-hiding (e.g., Verstraete et al, 1990;Borel et al, 1991;Kuusk, 1991;Hapke, 1986) …”

Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART 5) for Modeling Airborne and Satellite Spectroradiometer and LIDAR Acquisitions of Natural and Urban Landscapes

“…However, a more detailed consideration of the RT anisotropy can require a much larger number of fluxes (e.g., more than 100) [21]. Contrary to the N-flux method that computes the volumetric radiation balance in the 3D space, the radiosity method [22] is based on the radiation balance equation of a finite number N of discrete scatterers, which requires computation of the view factors between all N elements. It is, therefore, based on inversion of a NxN matrix, which is time consuming if N is too large, e.g., in case of complex landscape elements such as trees.…”