A GENERIC RIGOROUS SENSOR MODEL FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRIC PROCESSING OF PUSHBROOM PLANETARY IMAGES

Abstract. Currently, each planetary exploration mission team always develops its own software modules to support the photogrammetric processing of planetary images, and as a result of that the main drawbacks are lacking software reusability and the high cost of software development and maintenance. This is mainly due to that there is lack of a highly universal sensor model in the planetary mapping community. This paper presents a generic rigorous sensor model (RSM) for the photogrammetric processing of pushbroom planetary images. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) the implementation details of the generic RSM; (2) the optimized coordinates transformation methods between 3D ground points and 2D image points for linear pushbroom images; (3) a pipeline to acquire exterior orientation (EO) parameters for each planetary image. The generic RSM is developed based on the methodology used in airborne linear scanners ADS40. Specifically, the generic RSM comprises of a camera file and an orientation data file for each image. The camera file stores each detector’s calibrated image coordinates and the orientation data file contains each scan line’s EO parameters, such that the RSM can perform coordinates transformation among pixel coordinates, focal plane coordinates and ground coordinates. Furthermore, the generic RSM supports varying exposure time, summing mode and image distortions, which are typical problems that need to be solved in planetary mapping. We tested the generic RSM with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), Chandrayaan-1 Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) and Mars Express (MEX) High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) images. The geometric accuracy and computational efficiency of the developed generic RSM were compared with the famous planetary mapping software, namely Integrated System for Imagers and Spectrometers (ISIS). The experimental results demonstrate that the generic RSM has the merits of processing various types of pushbroom planetary images with a unified way and decreasing the software development and maintenance burden. Moreover, the developed generic RSM significantly improves the computational efficiency of orthophoto generation and tie points extraction for pushbroom planetary images.