FPGA-Based On-Board Geometric Calibration for Linear CCD Array Sensors

With increasing demands in real-time or near real-time remotely sensed imagery applications in such as military deployments, quick response to terrorist attacks and disaster rescue, the on-board geometric calibration problem has attracted the attention of many scientists in recent years. This paper presents an on-board geometric calibration method for linear CCD sensor arrays using FPGA chips. The proposed method mainly consists of four modules—Input Data, Coefficient Calculation, Adjustment Computation and Comparison—in which the parallel computations for building the observation equations and least squares adjustment, are implemented using FPGA chips, for which a decomposed matrix inversion method is presented. A Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 chip is selected and the MOMS-2P data used for inflight geometric calibration from DLR (Köln, Germany), are employed for validation and analysis. The experimental results demonstrated that: (1) When the widths of floating-point data from 44-bit to 64-bit are adopted, the FPGA resources, including the utilizations of FF, LUT, memory LUT, I/O and DSP48, are consumed at a fast increasing rate; thus, a 50-bit data width is recommended for FPGA-based geometric calibration. (2) Increasing number of ground control points (GCPs) does not significantly consume the FPGA resources, six GCPs is therefore recommended for geometric calibration. (3) The FPGA-based geometric calibration can reach approximately 24 times faster speed than the PC-based one does. (4) The accuracy from the proposed FPGA-based method is almost similar to the one from the inflight calibration if the calibration model and GCPs number are the same.