John A. Morgan’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

The method of simulated annealing is adapted to the temperature-emissivity separation problem. A patch of surface at the bottom of the atmosphere is assumed to be a graybody emitter with spectral emissivity ϵ(k) describable by a mixture of spectral endmembers. We prove that a simulated annealing search conducted according to a suitable schedule converges to a solution maximizing the a-posteriori probability that spectral radiance detected at the top of the atmosphere originates from a patch with stipulated T and ϵ(k). Any such solution will be nonunique. The average of a large number of simulated annealing solutions, however, converges almost surely to a unique maximum a-posteriori (MAP) solution for T and ϵ(k). © The Authors Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.