An evaluation tool kit of air quality micro-sensing units.

Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made the development of portable air-quality (AQ) micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs allow AQ measurements in many new applications, such as ambulatory exposure analyses and citizen science. Typically, the performance of these devices is assessed using the mean error or correlation coefficients with respect to a laboratory equipment. However, these criteria do not represent how such sensors perform outside of laboratory conditions in large-scale field applications, and do not cover all aspects of possible differences in performance between the sensor-based and standardized equipment, or changes in performance over time. This paper presents a comprehensive Sensor Evaluation Toolbox (SET) for evaluating AQ MSUs by a range of criteria, to better assess their performance in varied applications and environments. Within the SET are included four new schemes for evaluating sensors' capability to: locate pollution sources; represent the pollution level on a coarse scale; capture the high temporal variability of the observed pollutant and their reliability. Each of the evaluation criteria allows for assessing sensors' performance in a different way, together constituting a holistic evaluation of the suitability and usability of the sensors in a wide range of applications. Application of the SET on measurements acquired by 25 MSUs deployed in eight cities across Europe showed that the suggested schemes facilitates a comprehensive cross platform analysis that can be used to determine and compare the sensors' performance. The SET was implemented in R and the code is available on the first author's website.CITI-SENSE, initiated in October 2012, is a four year Collaborative Project partly funded by the EU FP7-ENV-2012 under grant agreement 308524

Simultaneous and constrained calibration of multiple hyperspectral images through a new generalized empirical line model

The empirical line (EL) calibration method is commonly used for atmospheric correction of remotely sensed spectral images and recovery of surface reflectance. The current EL-based methods are applicable to calibrate only single images. Therefore, the use of the EL calibration is impractical for imaging campaigns, where many (partially overlapped) images are acquired to cover a large area. In addition, the EL results are unconstrained and an undesired reflectance with negative values or larger than 100% can be obtained. In this paper, we use the standard EL model to formulate a new generalized empirical line (GEL) model. Based on the GEL, we present a novel method for simultaneous and constrained calibration of multiple images. This new method allows for calibration through multiple image constrained empirical line (MIcEL) and three additional calibration modes. Given a set of images, we use the available ground targets and automatically extracted tie points between overlapping images to calibrate all the images in the set simultaneously. Quantitative and visual assessments of the proposed method were carried out relatively to the off-the-shelf method quick atmospheric correction (QUAC), using real hyperspectral images and field measurements. The results clearly show the superiority of MIcEL with respect to the minimization of the difference between the reflectance values of the same object in different overlapping images. An assessment of the absolute accuracy, with respect to 11 field measurement points, shows that the accuracy of MIcEL, with an average mean absolute error (MAE) of ∼11%, is comparable with respect to the QUAC