AIRBORNE LINEAR ARRAY IMAGE GEOMETRIC RECTIFICATION METHOD BASED ON UNEQUAL SEGMENTATION

Abstract. As the linear array sensor such as multispectral and hyperspectral sensor has great potential in disaster monitoring and geological survey, the quality of the image geometric rectification should be guaranteed. Different from the geometric rectification of airborne planar array images or multi linear array images, exterior orientation elements need to be determined for each scan line of single linear array images. Internal distortion persists after applying GPS/IMU data directly to geometrical rectification. Straight lines may be curving and jagged. Straight line feature -based geometrical rectification algorithm was applied to solve this problem, whereby the exterior orientation elements were fitted by piecewise polynomial and evaluated with the straight line feature as constraint. However, atmospheric turbulence during the flight is unstable, equal piecewise can hardly provide good fitting, resulting in limited precision improvement of geometric rectification or, in a worse case, the iteration cannot converge. To solve this problem, drawing on dynamic programming ideas, unequal segmentation of line feature-based geometric rectification method is developed. The angle elements fitting error is minimized to determine the optimum boundary. Then the exterior orientation elements of each segment are fitted and evaluated with the straight line feature as constraint. The result indicates that the algorithm is effective in improving the precision of geometric rectification.