DROACOR or ATCOR?

[reseadmin]

DROACOR and ATCOR are both valid solutions of the physical inversion process for atmospheric correction.
They share mostly the same physics but some differences should be considered.
Major differences are a different physical formulation of the adjacency effects (DROACOR accounts for the close range situation, ATCOR does not), different treatments of spatial variablitiy of aerosol, water vapor and terrain (ATCOR excels on that) and the underlying radiative transfer code (MODTRAN for ATCOR,  LIBRADTRAN for DROACOR).
Also, the usability of DROACOR differs significantly from ATCOR-4:
DROACOR has been built for non-expert users and works mostly fully automatically with limited configuration possibilities on a set of preconfigured sensor systems and data formats. Expert knowledge is built into the code and is not visible directly for the end users.
ATCOR-4 is fully configurable and is well suited for expert users in a research environment. It requires some initial efforts to set up an automatic processing but, on the other hands, offers the maximum possibly physical accuracy available on the market.

Use DROACOR:
- if idealing with UAV based data flown below 1km above ground
- for tilted observations
- having large data sets to process
- if panel-based inflight calibration is required
- you want to have fast results

Use ATCOR:
- for satellites (in any case)
- for airborne data with flight altitudes above 2km above ground
- if you want to configure new sensor systems
- if you want to correct variable atmospheric conditions such as haze and aerosols