RIGOROUS GEOREFERENCING OF ALSAT-2A PANCHROMATIC AND MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY

Abstract. The exploitation of the full geometric capabilities of the High-Resolution Satellite Imagery (HRSI), require the development of an appropriate sensor orientation model. Several authors studied this problem; generally we have two categories of geometric models: physical and empirical models.

Based on the analysis of the metadata provided with ALSAT-2A, a rigorous pushbroom camera model can be developed. This model has been successfully applied to many very high resolution imagery systems. The relation between the image and ground coordinates by the time dependant collinearity involving many coordinates systems has been tested. The interior orientation parameters must be integrated in the model, the interior parameters can be estimated from the viewing angles corresponding to the pointing directions of any detector, these values are derived from cubic polynomials provided in the metadata. The developed model integrates all the necessary elements with 33 unknown. All the approximate values of the 33 unknowns parameters may be derived from the informations contained in the metadata files provided with the imagery technical specifications or they are simply fixed to zero, so the condition equation is linearized and solved using SVD in a least square sense in order to correct the initial values using a suitable number of well-distributed GCPs.

Using Alsat-2A images over the town of Toulouse in the south west of France, three experiments are done. The first is about 2D accuracy analysis using several sets of parameters. The second is about GCPs number and distribution. The third experiment is about georeferencing multispectral image by applying the model calculated from panchromatic image.