Geometric Accuracy of PhaseOne PAS Pana

Due to the currently limited size of CMOSsensors and the demand for larger capacity imaging systems, camera systems are being used instead of single cameras. Beside smaller systems, PhaseOne produces now the PAS Pana system with a combination of 5 RGB cameras and 2 near infrared (NIR) cameras, each with 14204 × 10652 pixels (Figures 1, 2 and 3). This system captures fused images at 48800 × 12400 pixels in RGB NIR (red line in Figure 1). With the pixel size of 3.76 μm, a fused image has a size of 183.5 mm * 46.6 mm. Through thermal control, the geometry of each individual subcamera can be almost completely guaranteed. However, this is not possible for such a large camera system, requiring a stitching of the subimages by adjustment. The overlapping two infrared camera images cover the whole range of the 5 RGB subcameras. For this reason, the joint NIR images are used as reference for fusing the RGB subcameras. The geometric quality of the fused images is analysed with a block adjustment and it corresponds to the image accuracy of the subcameras.