Evaluation of the RPC Model for Ziyuan-3 Three-line Array Imagery

Ziyuan-3 (ZY-3) satellite is the first civilian stereo mapping satellite in China and was designed to achieve the 1: 50,000 scale mapping for land and ocean. Rigorous sensor model (RSM) is required to build the relationship between the three-dimensional (3D) object space and two-dimensional (2D) image space of ZY-3 satellite imagery. However, each satellite sensor has its own imaging system with different physical sensor models, which increase the difficulty of geometric integration of multi-source images with different sensor models. Therefore, it is critical to generate generic model, especially rational polynomial coefficients (RPCs) of optical imagery. Recently, relatively a few researches have been conducted on RPCs generation to ZY-3 satellite. This paper proposes an approach to evaluate the performance of RPCs generation from RSM of ZY-3 imagery. Three scenario experiments with different terrain features (such as ocean, hill, city and grassland) are designed and conducted to comprehensively evaluate the replacement accuracies of this approach and analyze the RPCs fitting error. All the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved the encouraging accuracy of better than 1.946E−04 pixel in both x-axis direction and y-axis direction, and it indicates that the RPCs are suitable for ZY-3 imagery and can be used as a replacement for the RSM of ZY-3 imagery.