Abstract
The field of view (FOV) of pushbroom hyperspectral imager is limited by the compromise of the detector scale and requirements of spatial resolution. Combining imagers along the sampling direction effectively expands its FOV and improves the imaging efficiency. Due to the small overlapping area between the adjacent imagers, stitching the images using traditional methods need a large amount of ground control points (GCPs) or additional strips, which reduce the efficiency of both image acquisition and processing. This paper proposed a new method to precisely stitch images acquired from multiple pushbroom imagers. First, the relative orientation model was built based on the homonymy points to calculate the relative relationship between the adjacent imagers. Then rigorous geometric imaging model was adopted to generate a seamless stitching image. Simulation data was used to verify the accuracy of the method and to quantitatively analyze the effect of different error sources. Results show that the stitching accuracy is better than two pixels. Overall, this method provides a novel solution for stitching airborne multiple pushbroom images, to generate the seamless stitching image with wide FOV.
Highlights
Hyperspectral imaging technology has been developed over the past decades and is widely used in agriculture, vegetation, environmental monitoring, and other fields [1,2,3,4].Airborne technology has played an important role in these fields because of its higher spatial resolution and flexibility as compared to similar imagers on spaceborne platforms.The imaging mode of aerial hyperspectral imager can be mainly divided into whiskbroom, pushbroom, and step-stare mode
There is no complex mechanical scanning mechanism, so the weight and volume of the instrument are lower. This mode is difficult to get the balance between the wide field of view (FOV) and narrow instantaneous field of view (IFOV) [5]
We proposed a novel method for stitching images of airborne imaging system equipped with multiple pushbroom imagers
Summary
Hyperspectral imaging technology has been developed over the past decades and is widely used in agriculture, vegetation, environmental monitoring, and other fields [1,2,3,4]. Simple transformation models—such as affine transformation—are often used for original images registration [9,10,11,12,13,14] Since this method cannot provide a strict imaging model, the stitched images are difficult to perform geometric rectification processing, which limits further processing and applications [15]. The object-space-oriented method aims to establish relationship between the stitched image and each original sub-image by rigorous geometric models. For airborne pushbroom image stitching, Zhang [28] proposed a method which performs image registration after geometric rectification. Seamless stitching images can be produced based on the rigorous geometric model The advantage of this method is that calibration for relative orientation parameters.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call