Radiative Transfer Modeling and Monte Carlo Simulating of a New Digital Airborne Camera

Application of digital aerial camera was a milestone in the development of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. The new digital sensor leads to the changes of remote sensing imaging models. Generally, remote sensing imaging models have two kinds: geometric model and radiative model, in which radiative model mainly focus on the radiative quality of remote sensing images. In this paper, a new kind of airborne camera, namely Twice Imaging Digital Camera (TIDC), is introduced, which integrates the advantages of film airborne camera and digital one. It adopts twice imaging techniques to acquire large format, strict central projection images. The radiative transfer model of TIDC is built on the physical processing of digital imaging. The intermediate imaging device of TIDC influences digital images’ quality badly, such as luminous intensity distribution, decay and noise. For this reason, the approach of light tracing based on Monte Carlo is used to simulate radiative transfer in TIDC and test the performance of the intermediate imaging device. The importance of this work is: The Monte Carlo simulating experiment proposed by this paper can be widely applied in the simulation and modeling of other digital imaging systems, and has great practical value in the evaluation and optimization of image quality, the improvement of remote sending imaging system, as well as the estimate of image acquirement results.