Wide Field Camera

The Wide Field Camera (WFV) is a passive-optical pushbroom instrument designed for large-area land and vegetation monitoring.^[1] The instrument configuration differs between platforms in band count and detector technology.

On Gaofen-1, four WFV cameras are mounted side-by-side to achieve a combined swath of approximately 830 km.^[2] This configuration covers four spectral bands: blue (450-520 nm), green (520-590 nm), red (630-690 nm), and near-infrared (770-890 nm), at 16 m ground sampling distance, using CCD array detectors with pushbroom and TDI scanning.^[2]

On Gaofen-6, the WFV carries eight spectral bands at the same 16 m resolution across an 800 km swath.^[3] In addition to the four bands shared with the Gaofen-1 version, the Gaofen-6 WFV adds coastal (400-450 nm), yellow (590-630 nm), red-edge 1 (690-730 nm), and red-edge 2 (730-770 nm) bands, and uses CMOS detectors.^[3]

Documented applications include vegetation monitoring, land cover classification, NDVI computation, leaf area index and fractional vegetation cover retrieval, and precision agriculture. Crop identification using the red-edge and yellow bands is specific to the Gaofen-6 configuration.^{[3] [1]}