Geometric Accuracy Analysis for GaoFen3 Stereo Pair Orientation

Due to the all-weather and all-day advantage and the high geometric accuracy, the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) stereo pair has a wide application in digital elevation model (DEM) production and ground control points (GCPs) extraction around the world. The GaoFen3 (GF3) remote sensing satellite is the first C-band multipolarization SAR satellite with a resolution of 1 m in China and plays an important role in commercial exploitation and scientific research. This letter performs a comprehensive analysis of the geometric accuracy for GF3 stereo pair orientation. By analyzing the orientation error sources, it is proven that the affine transformation model in image space can effectively compensate the unmodeled errors in GF3 imagery. Based on the rational polynomial coefficient model, the integrated orientation model for the GF3 stereo pair is presented here. Moreover, the model parameters and weight determination are further studied to analyze the influence of weight matrixes on geometric accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed integrated orientation model can be effectively used for the GF3 stereo pair. The GCPs, convergent angle, and weight setting are the key factors influencing the geometric accuracy.

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