A NOVEL contour-based 3D terrain matching algorithm using wavelet transform

Abstract

A novel contour-based 3D terrain matching method is presented in this paper. In the method, iso-elevation contour map, a compact feature-based representation, is proposed to represent the reference digital elevation model (DEM) and recovered DEM (REM) from real-time data to convert 3D terrain matching to contour-based matching. In the contour-based matching, a normalized wavelet descriptor, which is invariant to 2D rigid transformation and insensitive to noise, is employed to describe contours. A very fast contour-matching algorithm based on normalized wavelet descriptor is presented and the computation cost is analyzed. Control points based on matched contour pairs are located and consistency checking is used to remove the possible mismatching points. 2D rigid image transformation model and parameter estimation using the rule of least root mean square error are discussed. The proposed matching method is robust and effective in computation, and can achieve high location accuracy. All these are demonstrated by experimental results using real terrain data.