36 research outputs found
PLEIADES-HR INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES FOR RADIOMETRIC IMAGE QUALITY COMMISSIONING
The first Pleiades-HR satellite, part of a constellation of two, has been launched on December 17, 2011. This satellite produces high
resolution optical images. In order to achieve good image quality, Pleiades-HR should first undergo an important 6 month
commissioning phase period. This phase consists in calibrating and assessing the radiometric and geometric image quality to offer
the best images to end users. This new satellite has benefited from technology improvements in various fields which make it stand
out from other Earth observation satellites. In particular, its best-in-class agility performance enables new calibration and assessment
techniques. This paper is dedicated to presenting these innovative techniques that have been tested for the first time for the Pleiades-
HR radiometric commissioning.
Radiometric activities concern compression, absolute calibration, detector normalization, and refocusing operations, MTF
(Modulation Transfer Function) assessment, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation, and tuning of the ground processing parameters.
The radiometric performances of each activity are summarized in this paper
PLEIADES-HR IMAGE QUALITY COMMISSIONING
PLEIADES is the highest resolution civilian earth observing system ever developed in Europe. This imagery program is conducted
by the French National Space Agency, CNES. It operates since 2012 a first satellite PLEIADES-HR launched on 2011 December
17th, a second one should be launched by the end of the year. Each satellite is designed to provide optical 70 cm resolution coloured
images to civilian and defence users. The Image Quality requirements were defined from users studies from the different spatial
imaging applications, taking into account the trade-off between on-board technological complexity and ground processing capacity.
The assessment of the image quality and the calibration operation have been performed by CNES Image Quality team during the 6
month commissioning phase that followed the satellite launch. These activities cover many topics gathered in two families :
radiometric and geometric image quality. The new capabilities offered by PLEIADES-HR agility allowed to imagine new methods of
image calibration and performance assessment.
Starting from an overview of the satellite characteristics, this paper presents all the calibration operations that were conducted during
the commissioning phase and also gives the main results for every image quality performance