Assessment of micro-vibrations effect on the quality of remote sensing satellites images

ABSTRACT Recently, there is a growing interest in analysing the degrading effect of satellite micro-vibrations due to the rapid growth in satellite technologies and the urgent need to precisely extract a huge amount of information from satellite images. Different kinds of micro-vibration have a notable effect on the quality of satellite images. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate and analyse the effect of all types of micro-vibration on the quality of images acquired by high-resolution satellites. An algorithm to simulate micro-vibrations is proposed. A very high-resolution satellite image from the Pleiades-neo satellite is selected as an example to be used in addressing the degrading effects of micro-vibrations. In this paper, the modulation transfer function (MTF) is used as a major function to model the degradation that has been conducted. Also, several quality metrics are used to quantitatively assess the degradation. The key result of this paper is the significant effect of micro-vibrations on the quality of remote sensing satellite images which is attributed to the main influential parameters. These parameters like blur diameter, vibration displacement, number of Time Delay and Integration (TDI) stages of the camera, and the ratio of the integration time to the vibration period.