Abstract
Recent years have witnessed the fast development of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). As an alternative to traditional image acquisition methods, UAVs bridge the gap between terrestrial and airborne photogrammetry and enable flexible acquisition of high resolution images. However, the georeferencing accuracy of UAVs is still limited by the low-performance on-board GNSS and INS. This paper investigates automatic geo-registration of an individual UAV image or UAV image blocks by matching the UAV image(s) with a previously taken georeferenced image, such as an individual aerial or satellite image with a height map attached or an aerial orthophoto with a DSM (digital surface model) attached. As the biggest challenge for matching UAV and aerial images is in the large differences in scale and rotation, we propose a novel feature matching method for nadir or slightly tilted images. The method is comprised of a dense feature detection scheme, a one-to-many matching strategy and a global geometric verification scheme. The proposed method is able to find thousands of valid matches in cases where SIFT and ASIFT fail. Those matches can be used to geo-register the whole UAV image block towards the reference image data. When the reference images offer high georeferencing accuracy, the UAV images can also be geolocalized in a global coordinate system. A series of experiments involving different scenarios was conducted to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves not only decimeter-level registration accuracy, but also comparable global accuracy as the reference images.
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 376 |
| Journal | Remote Sensing |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Status | Published - 1 Apr 2017 |
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Keywords
- Geo-registration
- Image registration
- Point cloud
- Unmanned aerial vehicle
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Earth and Planetary Sciences(all)
Cite this
Automatic UAV image geo-registration by matching UAV images to georeferenced image data. / Zhuo, Xiangyu; Koch, Tobias; Kurz, Franz; Fraundorfer, Friedrich; Reinartz, Peter.
In: Remote Sensing, Vol. 9, No. 4, 376, 01.04.2017.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Automatic UAV image geo-registration by matching UAV images to georeferenced image data
AU - Zhuo,Xiangyu
AU - Koch,Tobias
AU - Kurz,Franz
AU - Fraundorfer,Friedrich
AU - Reinartz,Peter
PY - 2017/4/1
Y1 - 2017/4/1
N2 - Recent years have witnessed the fast development of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). As an alternative to traditional image acquisition methods, UAVs bridge the gap between terrestrial and airborne photogrammetry and enable flexible acquisition of high resolution images. However, the georeferencing accuracy of UAVs is still limited by the low-performance on-board GNSS and INS. This paper investigates automatic geo-registration of an individual UAV image or UAV image blocks by matching the UAV image(s) with a previously taken georeferenced image, such as an individual aerial or satellite image with a height map attached or an aerial orthophoto with a DSM (digital surface model) attached. As the biggest challenge for matching UAV and aerial images is in the large differences in scale and rotation, we propose a novel feature matching method for nadir or slightly tilted images. The method is comprised of a dense feature detection scheme, a one-to-many matching strategy and a global geometric verification scheme. The proposed method is able to find thousands of valid matches in cases where SIFT and ASIFT fail. Those matches can be used to geo-register the whole UAV image block towards the reference image data. When the reference images offer high georeferencing accuracy, the UAV images can also be geolocalized in a global coordinate system. A series of experiments involving different scenarios was conducted to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves not only decimeter-level registration accuracy, but also comparable global accuracy as the reference images.
AB - Recent years have witnessed the fast development of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). As an alternative to traditional image acquisition methods, UAVs bridge the gap between terrestrial and airborne photogrammetry and enable flexible acquisition of high resolution images. However, the georeferencing accuracy of UAVs is still limited by the low-performance on-board GNSS and INS. This paper investigates automatic geo-registration of an individual UAV image or UAV image blocks by matching the UAV image(s) with a previously taken georeferenced image, such as an individual aerial or satellite image with a height map attached or an aerial orthophoto with a DSM (digital surface model) attached. As the biggest challenge for matching UAV and aerial images is in the large differences in scale and rotation, we propose a novel feature matching method for nadir or slightly tilted images. The method is comprised of a dense feature detection scheme, a one-to-many matching strategy and a global geometric verification scheme. The proposed method is able to find thousands of valid matches in cases where SIFT and ASIFT fail. Those matches can be used to geo-register the whole UAV image block towards the reference image data. When the reference images offer high georeferencing accuracy, the UAV images can also be geolocalized in a global coordinate system. A series of experiments involving different scenarios was conducted to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves not only decimeter-level registration accuracy, but also comparable global accuracy as the reference images.
KW - Geo-registration
KW - Image registration
KW - Point cloud
KW - Unmanned aerial vehicle
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85017621129&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/rs9040376
DO - 10.3390/rs9040376
M3 - Article
VL - 9
JO - Remote sensing
T2 - Remote sensing
JF - Remote sensing
SN - 2072-4292
IS - 4
M1 - 376
ER -