Automated improvement of RapidEye 1-B geo-referencing accuracy using 1:25,000 digital maps

The RapidEye can acquire the 6.5m spatial resolution satellite imagery with the high temporal resolution on each day, based on its constellation of five satellites. The image products are available in two processing levels of Basic 1B and Ortho 3A. The Basic 1B image have radiometric and sensor corrections and include RPCs (Rational Polynomial Coefficients) data. In Korea, the geometric accuracy of RapidEye imagery can be improved, based on the scaled national digital maps that had been built. In this paper, we present the fully automated procedures to georegister the 1B data using 1:25,000 digital maps. Those layers of map are selected if the layers appear well in the RapidEye image, and then the selected layers are RPCs-projected into the RapidEye 1B space for generating vector images. The automated edge-based matching between the vector image and RapidEye improves the accuracy of RPCs. The experimental results showed the accuracy improvement from 2.8 to 0.8 pixels in RMSE when compared to the maps.