Calculating band ratios

biosnicar typically returns spectral albedo for a given input configuration. However, for many applications, especially those related to remote sensing, don't actually need full spectral resolution. Instead, they require a few bands that match up with some remote sensor, such as a particular satellite or a drone camera.

A set of simple band ratios come built-in with biosnicar. You can execute the following after generating an albedo estimate:

I2DBA, I3DBA, NDCI, MCI, II = calculate_band_ratios(albedo)

This returns values for the following band ratios:

• I2DBA: The 2-band impurity index from Wang et al. 2018 (opens in a new tab)
• I3DBA: The 3 band impurity index from Wang et al. 2020 (opens in a new tab)
• NDCI: The normalized difference chlorophyll index from Mishra and Mishra, 2012 (opens in a new tab)
• MCI: The maximum chlorophyll index from Binding et al., 2013 (opens in a new tab)
• II: Impurity index from Dumont et al., 2014 (opens in a new tab)

For serious remote sensing products, there may also need to be some further manipulation of the biosnicar output, typically extracting the albedo for a given set of wavelengths and applying the sensor's response function.