Automated Image Matching for Satellite Images with Different GSDs through Improved Feature Matching and Robust Estimation

초록

Recently, many Earth observation optical satellites have been developed, as their demands were increasing. Therefore, a rapid preprocessing of satellites became one of the most important problem for an active utilization of satellite images. Satellite image matching is a technique in which two images are transformed and represented in one specific coordinate system. This technique is used for aligning different bands or correcting of relative positions error between two satellite images. In this paper, we propose an automatic image matching method among satellite images with different ground sampling distances (GSDs). Our method is based on improved feature matching and robust estimation of transformation between satellite images. The proposed method consists of five processes: calculation of overlapping area, improved feature detection, feature matching, robust estimation of transformation, and image resampling. For feature detection, we extract overlapping areas and resample them to equalize their GSDs. For feature matching, we used Oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) to improve matching performance. We performed image registration experiments with images KOMPSAT-3A and RapidEye. The performance verification of the proposed method was checked in qualitative and quantitative methods. The reprojection errors of image matching were in the range of 1.277 to 1.608 pixels accuracy with respect to the GSD of RapidEye images. Finally, we confirmed the possibility of satellite image matching with heterogeneous GSDs through the proposed method.

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