A new method to obtain uniform distribution of ground control points based on regional statistical information

Abstract

The Ground Control Points (GCPs) is an important source of fundamental data in geometric correction for remote sensing imagery. The quantity, accuracy and distribution of GCPs are three factors which may affect the accuracy of geometric correction. It is generally required that the distribution of GCP should be uniform, so they can fully control the accuracy of mapping regions. In this paper, we establish an objective standard of evaluating the uniformity of the GCPs’ distribution based on regional statistical information (RSI), and get an optimal distribution of GCPs. This sampling method is called RSIS for short in this work. The Amounts of GCPs in different regions by equally partitioning the image in regions in different manners are counted which forms a vector called RSI vector in this work. The uniformity of GCPs’ distribution can be evaluated by a mathematical quantity of the RSI vector. An optimal distribution of GCPs is obtained by searching the RSI vector with the minimum mathematical quantity. In this paper, the simulation annealing is employed to search the optimal distribution of GCPs that have the minimum mathematical quantity of the RSI vector. Experiments are carried out to test the method proposed in this paper, and sampling designs compared are simple random sampling and universal kriging model-based sampling. The experiments indicate that this method is highly recommended as new GCPs sampling design method for geometric correction of remotely sensed imagery.