Calibrating an airborne linear-array multi-camera system on the master focal plane with existing bundled images

Integrating multiple hyperspectral linear-array cameras into a Linear-array Multi-camera System (LMS) enables an expanded Field of View (FOV) while preserving high spatial resolution. However, the constrained capabilities of tie points are weakened by the limited overlap and short baseline between sub-cameras, hindering the attainment of reliable solutions for the theoretically ideal relative calibration model. Additionally, the absence of stereoscopic imaging in the LMS introduces the challenge of acquiring dense Ground Control Points (GCPs) throughout the FOV during calibration. In this paper, for calibrating an advanced airborne hyperspectral LMS named Arial Hyperspectral System-1000 (AHS-1000), we propose an equivalent geometric model that transforms the three-camera configuration of the LMS into a single-camera representation on the master camera's focal plane, which was successfully applied to the data processing system of AHS-1000. We extracted dense GCPs by matching each Level-1 sub-image of the LMS with the bundled images of an existing three-line-scanner aerial image dataset, whose orientation parameters have been accurately solved by bundle adjustment with sparse GCPs; the matched points of each sub-image were consistently projected onto the master focal plane as image observations for our equivalent model. Finally, we established a collinearity equation system and performed a combined strip adjustment to calibrate the distortion terms for each pixel of the equivalent camera. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our equivalent modeling method, which outperforms the classic modeling method by 2.83 pixels in interior accuracy and 0.86 pixels in relative accuracy, as well as outperforming another similar equivalent modeling method by 1.22 pixels in interior accuracy and 0.18 pixels in relative accuracy. Additionally, our comparison utilizing bundled images, public DOM (Digital Orthophoto Maps) /DEM (Digital Elevation Models), and high-precision DOM/DEM from aerial three-line-scanner demonstrates that bundled images can achieve higher calibration accuracy.