Epipolar image resampling from kompsat-3 in-track stereo images

Kompsat-3 is an optical high-resolution earth observation satellite launched in May 2012. The AEISS sensor of the Korean satellite provides 0.7m panchromatic and 2.8m multi-spectral images with 16.8km swath width from the sun-synchronous near-circular orbit of 685km altitude. Kompsat-3 is more advanced than Kompsat-2 and the improvements include better agility such as in-track stereo acquisition capability. This study investigated the characteristic of the epipolar curves of in-track Kompsat-3 stereo images. To this end we used the RPCs(Rational Polynomial Coefficients) to derive the epipolar curves over the entire image area and found out that the third order polynomial equation is required to model the curves. In addition, we could observe two different groups of curve patterns due to the dual CCDs of AEISS sensor. From the experiment we concluded that the third order polynomial-based RPCs update is required to minimize the sample direction image distortion. Finally we carried out the experiment on the epipolar resampling and the result showed the third order polynomial image transformation produced less than 0.7 pixels level of y-parallax.