Objectives  Discovering a moving target and obtaining its geographic position and moving speed is a very important and highly accurate application for optical video satellites. Generally, existing stabilization approaches for optical video satellites can obtain stable and smooth videos. However, these stabilized satellite videos often have no geometric information, which makes them difficult to meet the application requirements. To solve this problem, a geo-coded stabilization approach for optical video satellites in object space is proposed.

  Methods  The proposed approach takes full advantage of the orientation parameter information of satellite video frames. Firstly, an interframe motion model based on the frame orientation model is established. Secondly, orientation parameters of the auxiliary frame are motion-compensated to achieve a geometric consistency between the adjacent video frames. Finally, all the video frames are geo-coded in object space, and a geo-coded and smooth video can be generated.

  Results and Conclusions  The experimental results of a set of Zhuhai-1 satellite video frames show that the proposed approach can effectively eliminate the influence of satellite jitter errors and satellite position and attitude errors. Both the interframe geometric accuracy and the video stabilization accuracy achieved by the proposed approach reach better than 0.3 pixels.