TRAFFIC FLOW ESTIMATION FROM SINGLE SATELLITE IMAGES

Abstract. Exploiting a special focal plane assembly of most satellites allows for the extraction of moving objects from only one multispectral satellite image. Push broom scanners as used on most earth observation satellites are composed of usually more than one CCD line – mostly one for multispectral and one for panchromatic acquisistion. Some sensors even have clearly separated CCD lines for different multispectral channels. Such satellites are for example WorldView-2 or RapidEye.

During the Level-0-processing of the satellite data these bands get coregistered on the same ground level which leads to correct multispectral and exactly fitting pan images. But if objects are very high above the coregistering plane or are moving significantly in between the short acquisition time gap these objects get registered on different points in different channels.

Measuring relative distances of these objects between these channels and knowing the acquisition time gap allows retrieving the speed of the objects or the height above the coregistering plane.

In this paper we present our developed method in general for different satellite systems – namely RapidEye, WorldView-2 and the new Pl´eiades system. The main challenge in most cases is nevertheless the missing knowledge of the acquisition time gap between the different CCD lines and often even of the focal plane assembly. So we also present our approach to receive a coarse focal plane assembly model together with a most likely estimation of the acqusition time gaps for the different systems.