What is a Colorized Reflectance Map?

You may have noticed recently that our standard NIR stitched images have changed from a simple stitch, to a Colorized Reflectance Map.

What is a Colorized Reflectance Map and why do we use it?

The Colorized Reflectance Map takes into the account the various parameters of the camera (ISO, timestamp, geolocation, etc.) to generate true values for what the ground is reflecting back at the sensor. When you just have raw images, you are getting what the sensor captured with those parameters at the time, which are used to create a visually appealing image. However, a reflectance map will, for example, take in the sun angle and cause the NIR channel to have higher values. That is often the blue channel of our modified sensors, so images will come in higher on the blue when flying over plants than it would in the other two channels (where plants reflect minimally).