Parallax error correction method for ASTER SWIR bands

Advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer (ASTER) short wave infrared radiometer (SWIR) is planned to be launched with EOS-AM1 in 1998. SWIR has six bands and the linear detector arrays of all the bands are located on the same focal plane in parallel each other. Therefore parallax occurs between the six bands data. Large parallax causes errors in multiband data processing and so it is necessary to eliminate influential parallax from observation image. For the purpose of correcting parallax, we have developed a parallax estimation method for ASTER SWIR bands. To estimate parallax, image matching method is employed. But image matching method is not always effective. Cloud or featureless area in the image misleads the image matching process into a wrong result. So to prevent such misleading and to judge the validity of the result of the image matching method, coarse digital elevation model (DEM) data of which the cell size is about 1 km is introduced.