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Noticeable striping artifacts in collected satellite imagery, caused by the inconsistency of pushbroom sensor detector responses, degrade the image quality. Relative radiometric calibration aims to calibrate inconsistencies in terms of detector responses, thereby eliminating detector-level striping artifacts. Yaw calibration has become the preferred imagery-based calibration method for satellites without on-board calibration equipment, owing to its high accuracy and convenience. However, it often relies on a large uniform field on the Earth's surface and is a linear calibration method. This method does not consider acquisition-related geometric errors associated with the sensor, resulting in reduced calibration accuracy. In this study, we propose an improved method for yaw calibration, which accounts for the geometric distortion of sensor imaging and does not require a uniform field. A fast geometric-positioning algorithm was used to remove geometric distortion, followed by high-precision extraction of the calibration reference for each sensor's detector. The dynamic range of the sensor calibration was extended, followed by the calibration of the sensor nonlinear response model. Our results based on Yaogan-25 images suggest the following: 1) the improved method effectively eliminates the ``sawtooth'' caused by the yaw calibration method without considering the geometric distortion and 2) it outperforms other imagery-based calibration methods with respect to visual destriping effects such that the root-mean-square deviations of the corrected imagery experienced a decrease of 0.65 percentage point, compared with that of the statistical method, and 0.17 percentage point for the yaw calibration. Such improvements will promote high-quality applications of remote-sensing images.

Rolling element bearings are crucial, of high failure rate and easy damage parts of rotating machinery, and significantly affect safe and reliable production processes. Much more attention has been focused on fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings in recent years. This article presents a novel feature extraction scheme for the classification of multiple bearing faults. Multi-Scale Sample Entropy (M-SSampEn) is combined with Energy Moment (EM) to construct a time-domain Multi-Scale Sample Entropy-based Energy Moment (M-SSampEn-EM) feature extractor. The classifier model for the proposed fault classification system has been built using the Least Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM). The M-SSampEn-EM feature extractor is used to capture two-dimensional representative eigenvectors from multiple fault classes' bearing vibration data. Its separability performance is ensured by optimizing the feature-extraction parameters, including the Embedded Dimension and the Tolerance, etc. The LS-SVM classifier is also compared with two Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers, i.e., Radial Basis Function NN (RBFNN) and Probabilistic NN (PNN), to show it better generalization performance on bearing fault classification. The experimental study verifies the excellent capacity of the proposed approach in bearing fault classification.

Sensor instability, dark currents, and other factors often cause stripe noise corruption in hyperspectral remote sensing images and severely limit their application in practical purposes. Previous studies have proposed numerous destriping algorithms that have yielded impressive results. Although most destriping algorithms are based on the premise of additive noise, a few studies have focused directly on multiplicative stripe noise. This article fully analyzes the characteristics of the stripe noise of OHS-01 images and proposes a multiplicative stripe noise removal method. Specifically, stripe noise is tackled by performing radiometric normalization of different columns in the image. First, the relative gain coefficients of adjacent columns are separated based on prior knowledge. Second, the local relative intensity correspondence of the image columns are established by means of intensity propagation, intensity connection, and so on. Finally, the above-mentioned process is iterated in multiscale space, and the accumulated gain correction coefficient maps were used to correct the radiation of the original image. The results of extensive experiments on simulated and real remote sensing image data demonstrate that the proposed method can, in most cases, yield desirable results. In certain cases, the results are even better, visually, and quantitatively, than those obtained using classical algorithms. Moreover, the proposed method has high robustness and efficiency. Thus, it can conform to the requirements of engineering applications.

During the 5 years following the launch of CBERS-02B in September 2007, China launched a sequence of high-resolution optical satellites that are able to acquire high-resolution images globally. However, most of the satellites launched before 2012 have such poor geometric accuracy, due to both the low technological level of the hardware and design defects, so that their application (e.g., to surveys of land resources) is greatly restricted. Thus, they cannot meet national demands for high-resolution optical images with good geometric accuracy. Following the launch of ZiYuan3-01 (ZY3-01) on January 9, 2012, the retrieval of its images has demonstrated the excellent geometric accuracy that has led Chinese high-resolution optical satellites (CHROSs) to attract much attention from international researchers. As CHROSs suffer from more complex errors than international commercial satellites, such as SPOT and IKONOS, conventional processes widely used in the international field to improve accuracy cannot be applied to them. This paper focuses on the in-orbit active CHROSs and proposes a series of methods for improvement of geometric accuracy. Using high-accuracy ground control data collected from different areas, the accuracy of CHROSs following the improvement measures is assessed. The results indicate that good geometric accuracy could be achieved using the proposed methods, given the conditions of both the low level of the hardware technology and the inherent design defects of CHROSs.

The Ziyuan-3 (ZY-3) satellite was designed to satisfy 1:50000 scale mapping requirements. This study uses 556 images obtained by ZY-3, from June 1 to October 31, 2013, covering an area of 3 500 000 km 2 in midwestern China. A total of 900 check points measured by a global positioning system were also used to conduct the planar accuracy verification. The experimental results show that the ZY-3 nadir sensor calibration images achieved a planar root mean square error (RMSE) of 10.8 m without the use of ground control points (GCPs). In addition, the verification of vertical accuracy employed 12 ZY-3 stereo image pairs distributed over an area of 14 000 km 2 around Taiyuan in the Shanxi Province of China, and a Digital Elevation Model with 0.5-m vertical accuracy was used for reference and validation. The vertical accuracy of forward interaction and stereo-extracted Digital Surface Model (DSM) from the stereo images were both validated without GCPs. The experimental results demonstrate that the overall vertical RMSE of the forward intersection was 6.58 m; it was 5.21 and 7.07 m for flat and mountainous terrain, respectively. Moreover, the overall vertical RMSE of DSM was 5.56 m; it was 4.37 and 5.69 m for flat and mountainous terrain, respectively. It can be seen from the experimental results of planar and vertical accuracy verification that ZY-3 imagery is able to satisfy the requirements of 1:50000 topographic mapping in China without using GCPs.

A rational function model (RFM) can be used directly to convert the relationships between image coordinates and object space coordinates without using any physical imaging parameters (such as satellite position and attitude). Thus, RFMs facilitate versatility and high security during geometric processing of optical satellite imagery. Increasingly, RFMs are offered to users as the basic geolocation model for further geometric processing by imagery vendors. However, imagery vendors might perform inadequate in-orbit geometric calibrations, or the calibrated geometric parameters might not be updated in a timely manner. Thus, the RFMs may suffer from high distortion due mainly to interior errors (such as lens distortion). Using the radiometric correction products of Ziyuan1-02C panchromatic and multispectral sensor as examples, the present study addresses the compensation of systematic errors in RFMs. An undistorted RFM can be generated after calibrating the interior error compensation model once, before high-accuracy registration between the panchromatic imagery and multispectral imagery can be achieved using the undistorted RFM. Experimental evaluations based on the positioning accuracy using a few ground control points (GCPs) with an undistorted RFM matched the accuracy of the GCPs. In addition, our approach greatly improves the accuracy of registration (which surpasses 0.7 panchromatic pixels) between panchromatic and multispectral imagery.

Given that long strip satellite images have the same error distribution characteristics, we propose a block adjustment method for satellite images based on the strip constraint. First, the image point coordinates are calculated in the strip image coordinate system based on the offset value of the adjacent image. Second, the rational function model (RFM) of the strip image is regenerated using the RFM of single images, and the compensation grid is also generated. Third, block adjustment of the strip image is implemented based on the RFM with an affine transformation parameter. Finally, the affine transformation parameters of single images are recalculated using the affine transformation parameters of the strip image. Experiments using ZY-3 satellite images showed that block adjustment of satellite images based on a strip constraint (strip adjustment) can produce better results than block adjustment of satellite images based on a single image in sparse control conditions. The test results demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

Ziyuan1-02C (ZY1-02C) was launched on December 22, 2011, and it is the first civilian high-resolution remote sensing satellite in China. However, the limited precision of the onboard attitude measurement system causes many errors during attitude transfer by ZY1-02C. Thus, there are complex distortions in the images obtained by ZY1-02C, which restricts its application greatly. In this paper, we consider the feasibility of attitude error correction based on parallel observations with high-resolution cameras, and the method is described in detail. To validate the efficiency of the proposed method, several images and corresponding control data were collected from the Henan, Taihang Mountain, Neimeng, and Taiyuan areas in China. The experimental results indicate that seamless mosaic images without distortion can be obtained using our method. Furthermore, the positioning accuracy with a few ground control points (GCPs) was shown to be better than 1.5 pixels and equivalent to the accuracy of the GCPs.

The ZiYuan-3 (ZY-3) remote sensing satellite is China's first civilian high-resolution stereo mapping satellite. Because the interior orientation parameters measured before launch are biased, the multispectral (four-band) images collected by ZY-3 exhibit low-accuracy band-to-band registration, which affects their subsequent applications. This paper presents a valid method for interior orientation determination of the ZY-3 multispectral sensor by determining the look angles of the charge-coupled device arrays for all bands. One band is chosen as the benchmark band, and its interior orientation is determined using the relevant ZY-3 image collected over the calibration field and the corresponding digital orthoimage map and digital elevation model. The remaining bands are then calibrated using the benchmark band as control data. The quality of the calibration is further enhanced by shortening the calibration period and by combining images collected over different calibration fields, which decreases the negative effects of errors in the satellite's attitude and position data. The interior orientation of the multispectral sensor in ZY-3 was determined using data sets taken over two calibration fields, namely, Dengfeng (Henan Province) and Tianjin. Evaluation experiments were performed using ZY-3 multispectral images and ground control points (GCPs) collected over several different periods and areas. The positioning accuracy of the ZY-3 multispectral images with a limited number of GCPs after calibration of the interior orientation was better than 0.3 pixels, and the band-to-band registration accuracy was up to 0.15 pixels.

The ZiYuan-3 surveying satellite (ZY-3) is a high-precision civilian satellite imaging sensor. Since its launch on January 9, 2012, it has been in operation for one and a half years. Although the initial postlaunch ZY-3 geometric accuracy was verified during an in-orbit operation period, on-orbit calibration was still necessary from time to time. This on-orbit calibration has vastly improved the location accuracy in planimetry for ZY-3 panchromatic images. This letter briefly describes the principle of on-orbit calibration and production processes of sensor-corrected products. Furthermore, block adjustment based on a rational function model test showed planimetric and vertical accuracy values of 10 m and 5 m, respectively, without ground control points (GCPs). The accuracy values improved to 3 m and 2 m, respectively, with a few GCPs. The statistics results are from ten different regions with independent checkpoints (ICPs). All accuracy values are the root-mean-square error of ICPs. Therefore, ZY-3 can be used for the generation of cartographic maps at the 1 : 50 000 scale and for revision and updates of 1 : 25 000 scale maps. Compared with other mainstream high-resolution satellite images of the same ground resolution, ZY-3's geometric accuracy is almost the same and sometimes even better.