POINTING BIAS CALIBRATION OF GAOFEN-7 LASER ALTIMETER BASED ON SINGLE LASER FOOTPRINT IMAGE

Abstract. The GaoFen-7 (GF-7) satellite is successfully launched on November 3, 2019, and its laser altimeter system is officially and firstly employed as the main payload for earth observations in China, which includes two sets of laser altimeters and laser footprint cameras. The Laser Footprint Image (LFI) is used to capture laser spots on the ground. In order to make up for the shortcomings of high cost field work for the traditional laser altimeter ground detector-based calibration method, this paper proposes a novel laser altimeter calibration method based on LFI. Firstly, the spaceborne laser calibration model and the Laser Footprint Camera (LFC) geolocation model are established. Secondly, the image coordinates of laser spot centroid are extracted from LFI, and the ground location of is obtained by ray intersecting with the reference Digital Surface Model (DSM). Finally, the centroid of laser spot is considered as Ground Control Point (GCP), and the pointing bias of GF-7 laser altimeter is calibrated by the Least Squares Estimation (LSE). The ALOS Global Digital Surface Model “ALOS World 3D-30m” (AW3D30) is used to evaluate the elevation accuracy of GF-7 laser altimeter before and after the calibration. The results indicate that elevation accuracy of the GF-7 laser altimeter is improved significantly after calibration. The proposed method can be effectively applied for high-frequency geometric calibration of GF-7 laser altimeter.