A Global Adjustment Method for Photogrammetric Processing of Chang’E-2 Stereo Images

The Chang’E-2 (CE2) lunar orbiter was the second robotic orbiter of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, as well as the pioneer robotic orbiter in the soft landing project in the second phase of the program. It used a two-line stereo camera to acquire stereo images with global coverage at a resolution of 7 m. The stereo images have a large potential for producing the best lunar topographic map. However, errors and uncertainties in the interior orientation (IO) and exterior orientation (EO) parameters of the camera seriously affected the accuracy of the global topographic mapping. In this paper, a global adjustment method is proposed to eliminate the effects of these errors. The error models are represented by a Chebyshev polynomial. The polynomial coefficients were estimated as unknowns using five lunar laser ranging retroreflector (LRRR) points as ground control points in the adjustment. The experimental results show that the planimetric and height deviations between the neighboring strips were 5 and 2 m (less than 1 pixel), respectively, which were decreased by 32.6 and 31.5 times, respectively, relative to those derived from the original EO parameters. The large inconsistencies in the CE2 trajectory data were significantly reduced after the adjustment. In comparison with the LRRR positions, the planimetric and height errors ranged from 21 to 97 m and −19 to 10 m, respectively. A new seamless mosaic and high precision absolute position topographic map has been generated using this method.