GEOMETRY OF SATELLITE IMAGES - CALIBRATION AND MATHEMATICAL MODELS

Satellite cameras are calibrated before launch in detail and in general, but it cannot be guaranteed that the geometry is not changing during launch and caused by thermal influence of the sun in the orbit. Modem satellite imaging systems are based on CCD-line sensors. Because of the required high sampling rate the length of used CCD-lines is limited. For reaching a sufficient swath width, some CCD-lines are combined to a longer virtual CCD-line. The images generated by the individual CCD-lines do overlap slightly and so they can be shifted in x- and y-direction in relation to a chosen reference image just based on tie points. For the alignment and difference in scale, control points are required. The resulting virtual image has only negligible errors in areas with very large difference in height caused by the difference in the location of the projection centers. Color images can be related to the joint panchromatic scenes just based on tie points. Pan-sharpened images may show only small color shifts in very mountainous areas and for moving objects. The direct sensor orientation has to be calibrated based on control points. Discrepancies in horizontal shift can only be separated from attitude discrepancies with a good three-dimensional control point distribution. For such a calibration a program based on geometric reconstruction of the sensor orientation is required. The approximations by 3D-affine transformation or direct linear transformation (DL n cannot be used. These methods do have also disadvantages for standard sensor orientation. The image orientation by geometric reconstruction can be improved by self calibration with additional parameters for the analysis and compensation of remaining systematic effects for example caused by a not linear CCD-line. The determined sensor geometry can be used for the generation? of rational polynomial coefficients, describing the sensor geometry by relations of polynomials of the ground coordinates X, Y and Z.