Estimation and analysis of along-track attitude jitter of ZiYuan-3 satellite based on relative residuals of tri-band multispectral imagery

Many high-resolution optical satellites suffer from the issue of attitude jitter that restricts the geometric quality and imaging performance. Recently, detection and estimation of spacecraft attitude jitter from imaging sensors has attracted extensive attentions because of its convenience and flexibility. Due to the existence of other impacting factors such as topographic effect, the image-based attitude jitter estimation in the along-track direction is a more challenging task and thus has been less concerned than that in the cross-track direction. This paper proposes a novel along-track jitter estimation method based on relative residuals of tri-band multispectral imagery, which effectively removes the influence of topographic effect and integration time variation. The relative residuals without the influence of topographic information are firstly acquired from a three-line parallax observation system using a precise dense matching scheme with subpixel phase correlation. The influence of integration time variation is analyzed and removed through the specific processing. Finally, the along-track attitude jitter is estimated from the relative residuals according to the harmonic addition theorem in the spatial-domain rebuilding method, and by means of Fourier transform and nonlinear optimization in the frequency-domain rebuilding method. Experiments were carried out with ZiYuan-3 (ZY-3) multispectral imagery. The comparisons with the conventional method and the attitude measurement data validate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed method, and the topographic parallax analysis after distortion correction demonstrates the performance of jitter compensation using the estimated results. In addition, a further multitemporal analysis confirms the discovery of attitude jitter with a new frequency component of around 0.2 Hz in the along-track direction and reveals the varying trends for the along-track attitude jitter of ZY-3 satellite.