An Improved Jitter Detection Method Based on Parallax Observation of Multispectral Sensors for Gaofen-1 02/03/04 Satellites

Gaofen-1 02/03/04 satellites, the first civilian high resolution optical operational constellation in China, have Earth observation capabilities with panchromatic/multispectral imaging at 2/8 m resolution. Satellite jitter, the fluctuation of satellite points, has a negative influence on the geometric quality of high-resolution optical satellite imagery. This paper presents an improved jitter detection method based on parallax observation of multispectral sensors for Gaofen-1 02/03/04 satellites, which can eliminate the effect of the relative internal error induced by lens distortion, and accurately estimate the parameters of satellite jitter. The relative internal error is estimated by polynomial modelling and removed from the original parallax image generated by pixel-to-pixel image matching between two bands of images. The accurate relative time-varying error and absolute distortion caused by satellite jitter could be estimated by using the sine function. Three datasets of multispectral images captured by Gaofen-1 02/03/04 satellites were used to conduct the experiments. The results show that the relative system errors in both the across- and along-track directions can be modelled with a quadratic polynomial, and satellite jitter with a frequency of 1.1–1.2 Hz in the across-track direction was detected for the first time. The amplitude of the jitter differed in the three datasets. The largest amplitude, from satellite 04, is 1.3 pixels. The smallest amplitude, from satellite 02, is 0.077 pixels. The reliability and accuracy of the detection results were verified by using two groups of band combinations and ortho-images with a 1 m resolution. The comparison results show that the detection accuracy is improved by approximately 30% using the proposed method