High resolution airborne SAR triangulation application supported by sparse-GCPs

At present, a great deal of western area in China has still lacked of corresponding relief maps. Because of the cloudy or soupy mountainous conditions in these districts, the high resolution airborne SAR imagery has often been chose as the irreplaceable data resource, while remote sensing cartography technique is being performed. At the same time, the mission that how to acquire enough accuracy and quantity of ground control points (GCPs), which are difficult to be measured in practical, has become an urgent demand for mapping tasks. This work analyzes the practical conditions, and divides it into two instances, that is, which with and without navigation data provided from GPS/INS system. It discusses the aerial triangulation theory from airborne SAR images, with which only sparse GCPs around the mapping area could be provided, puts forward the corresponding mathematical model, and sequent technique flow, according of which we can obtain the coordinates of the required GCPs for cartography. Lastly, the airborne SAR imagery of 1m-resolution, in the area of Zhengzhou, in China, has been taken as an experiment data to validate the model, and a corresponding accuracy analysis derived from the developed software has been presented.