Development and calibration of the Airborne Three-Line Scanner (TLS) imaging system

for a large number of ground control points (GCP) for georeferThe Airborne Three-Line-Scanner (TLS) imaging system has encing the imagery. These developments offer new possibilities provided proof of the concept of stereo and multispectral for the production such as digital surface/terrain models, mapping using the pushbroom mode because frame digital orthoimages, and classification maps (Fritsch and Stallmann, imaging systems with comparable coverage and resolution 2000). have not been available and are not likely to be available in On the other hand, progress in the development of airborne the future. A prototype of the TLS system, the STARIMAGER, was linear imaging systems has been made in the last decades. developed jointly in 2000 by the STARLABO Corporation of These sensors can provide higher resolution and repeated temJapan and the University of Tokyo and is introduced in this poral panchromatic, multispectral, and hyperspectral image paper. A laboratory method and algorithm to evaluate the data for mapping and GIS applications (Tempelmann et al., optical characteristics of STARIMAGER are presented. The 2000). The Digital Photogrammetry Assembly (DPA) was finprinciple is to measure the object-space angles of a sufficient ished and tested in 1995 by the Institute of Photogrammetry, number of CCD elements in two directions as seen through the University of Stuttgart to produce 1:25,000- and 1:50,000-scale optics. These angular measurements reflect the real camera maps, and to automatically generate a DTM to accuracies of betgeometry of both the optics and the CCD arrays. A mathe- ter than 3 m (Hahn et al., 1996). The ADS40 airborne digital matical model based on the central perspective projection has sensor, developed in 2000 by LH Systems, has been tested in