A Study on Automation of Image Collection Planning

One of main concerns of operators of the Earth observation satellite is taking images as many as possible under the constraints of satellite resources during fixed period. In order to achieve this goal, satellite operators are strongly required to generate the optimized image collection plans, and it is a very time consuming process to achieve an optimized image collection plan when it is done by manual. This paper suggests automation of image collection planning based on the dynamic programming algorithm to reduce the time required for image collection planning. The validity of the proposed method is tested using operating satellite system and the result is given in this paper.