Abstract: As an active branch of remote sensing, nighttime light remote sensing can reflect the traces of human social activities. It has unique advantages in monitoring the city, assessing economic parameters and estimating the impact of major events. With the increasing maturity of data mining of night-light remote sensing, higher requirements are required for the traditional night-light remote sensing satellite. Based on concept of volunteered geographic information, this paper introduces a new method which is called PARS(passenger aircraft remote sensing). We capture night-light remote sensing image of Changsha using this method, and then compare the results with the traditional satellite remote sensing data. The data show that night-light remote sensing data captured by PARS has higher resolution, more bands and rapider revisit period than traditional remote sensing. To conclude, it is a low-cost, flexible and diversified remote sensing data acquisition method with great potential.

Key words: night-light remote sensing, passenger aircraft remote sensing, volunteered geographic information, data validation, SFM algorithm