LIDAR-ASSISTED MULTI-IMAGE MATCHING FOR 3-D MODEL AND SENSOR POSE REFINEMENT

• Main Authors: PACK ROBERT TAYLOR, ISRAELSEN PAUL
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 12.08.2010
• Subjects: ANALOGOUS ARRANGEMENTS USING OTHER WAVES; CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; DETERMINING DISTANCE OR VELOCITY BY USE OF RADIO WAVES; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL; LOCATING OR PRESENCE-DETECTING BY USE OF THE REFLECTION ORRERADIATION OF RADIO WAVES; MEASURING; PHYSICS; RADIO DIRECTION-FINDING; RADIO NAVIGATION; TESTING

A 3-D model of a subject matter may be constructed from a plurality of lidar shots and overlapping EO images of the subject matter. Each of the lidar shots may be mapped to image patches within two or more of the EO images using navigation data associated with the lidar shots and EO images. Each of the back-projected lidar points may be set as a centroid of an image patch (collection of pixels) within an EO image. With the aid of the lidar centroids, the image patches in overlapping EO images may be correlated and an image-based pixel-to-pixel coordinate association therebetween may be calculated. Using this refined pixel-to-pixel coordinate association, a 3-D model of the subject matter may be constructed and refined using photogrammetry techniques. Videogrammetry techniques, such as optical flow techniques, may be applied if a sufficient amount of EO imagery data is available.