3d Capabilities of Pleiades Satellite

Abstract

End of 2011 a new optical satellite, called Pléiades, was launched by the French space agency (CNES). It provides 20kmx20km images at 0.5 meters. This agile acquisition system is able to relocate very rapidly and scan the earth in any direction. The agility of the system offers the ability to acquire multi viewing angle images of the same area during the same orbit. This ability to capture, from a single stereoscopic pair, to a sequence of 25 images, allows enhancing the quality and the completeness of automatically extracted 3D maps. The aim of the study is to validate and quantify the capacity of the Pléiades system to perform 3D mapping. The analysis explores the advantages in terms of quality and automatism to use more than 2 stereoscopic images. In the last 10 years, automatic 3D processing of digital images became more and more popular and efficient. Thanks to aerial images with very large overlap and very high resolution satellite images, new methodologies and algorithms have been implemented to improve the quality and accuracy of automatic 3D processing. We propose to experiment the same type of approaches using Pléiades images to produce digital elevation models (DEM). A focus is made on analysing the 3D processing using video like (multi viewing) acquisitions. Different reference sites with very accurate 3D control points are used to quantify the quality of the Pléiades DEM. Different acquisition modes are explored from a single stereo pair to a sequence of 17 images.

Assessing the ability of Pleiades stereo imagery to determine height changes in earthquakes: A case study for the El Mayor‐Cucapah epicentral area

“…New generations of very high resolution (VHR) satellites, e.g., Pleiades 1A/1B (0.7 m panchromatic), GeoEye‐1 (0.41 m panchromatic), WorldView‐1/2 (0.46 m panchromatic), and WorldView‐3 (0.31 m panchromatic), allow rapid 3‐D reconstruction due to their short revisit time and stereo capability [ de Lussy et al , ; Fraser and Ravanbakhsh , ; Mitchell and MacNabb , ; Poli and Toutin , ; Bernard et al , ]. VHR stereo imagery can in principle measure surface topography with decimetric precision, comparable to lidar surveys, but at a much lower cost and with higher availability.…”

Dem Generation With Short Base Length Pleiades Triplet

“…Poli et al 2013, Durand et al 2013), but always with large base length image combinations. Only (Bernard et al 2012) handled also small base length image combinations; but the special problems have not been handled in detail as it will be done here.…”

Satellite-Based Reconstruction of the Volcanic Deposits during the December 2015 Etna Eruption

“…Optical satellite imagery, especially at sub-meter spatial resolution, has also recently been a useful tool to produce digital topographic data [4]. The new generation of Earth observation satellites has the ability to increase acquisition capacity, allowing nearby areas to be acquired during the same orbit at multiple views, i.e., from different incidence angles [5]. This aspect greatly improves the 3D mapping of the Earth surface from optical satellite images allowing the generation of very high-resolution digital elevation models [6].…”