Abstract. Satellite imaging direction angles, including the azimuth angle and the incidence angle, are the basic information used for satellite camera network structure analysis. They play an important role in 3D reconstruction using satellite images. In this paper, a satellite imaging direction angle estimation method based on rational polynomial coefficients is proposed for use when the satellite imaging direction angles are not available. Using rational polynomial coefficients, a vertical line on the ground is projected into the image plane, and the satellite imaging direction angles are estimated by analyzing the projection. Satellite images acquired by SPOT6, SOPT7 and Pleiades with different satellite imaging direction angles were used to test the feasibility of the proposed method. The experimental results were analyzed in detail combined with the method and the data. The experimental results show that the azimuth angle estimation error is less than 1.30 degrees, and the incidence angle estimation error is less than 0.83 degrees. This level of accuracy is sufficient for satellite camera network structure analysis.

Abstract. The quality of the 3D model reconstructed using multi-view satellite image depends on the quality of the image. To evaluate the geometric quality of the satellite image, we proposed a method to evaluate the geometric distortion for satellite images and defined the deviation coefficient as a metric to evaluate the bending degree of a curve. After projecting a ground grid consisting of straight lines into the image space, the geometric distortion of the image can be evaluated quantitatively by calculating the deviation coefficients of the projection trajectories. Experiments have been carried out with three datasets obtained by JiLin-1, GaoFen-2, and WorldView-3 respectively. The results show that the proposed method can used to evaluate the geometric quality of satellite images effectively, and this evaluation method will be useful in image selecting in 3D reconstruction using multi-view satellite images.