Low-cost orthographic imagery

Commercial aerial imagery websites, such as Google Maps, MapQuest, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and Yahoo! Maps, provide high- seamless orthographic imagery for many populated areas, employing sophisticated equipment and proprietary image postprocessing pipelines. There are many areas of the world with poor coverage where locals might benefit from recent, high-resolution orthographic imagery, but which do not fit into the schedules and scaling model of the big sites. This paper describes MapStitcher, a system that orthorectifies and geographically registers imagery using only low-cost capturing equipment. MapStitcher combines manually-entered relationships between images and known ground references with a MOPs-based image-stitching technique that automatically discovers image-toimage relationships. Our image registration pipeline first extracts and matches feature points, then clusters images, then uses RANSAC-initialized bundle adjustment to simultaneously optimize all constraints over t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Peter Pesti, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, Drew Steedly, Matthew Uyttendaele
• Keywords: Database, GIS 2008, Image Postprocessing Pipelines, Image Stitching Permission, Seamless Orthographic Imagery