Automatic 3D Coordinate Extraction from High Resolution Digital Aerial Images

Abstract

Image matching has been widely used in various fields such as digital photogrammetry, remote sensing, image processing and computer vision. In this study, the speeded up robust feature extraction algorithm for automatic point extraction was applied to a pair of high resolution digital aerial stereo images. In contrast to other studies, the universal transverse mercator coordinates of randomly selected test points were computed automatically with the proposed approach and compared with the same points that were manually measured. As a result, the mean square differences for the UTM coordinates’ in the X, Y and Z axes were calculated as ±0.043, 0.030 and 0.153 m, respectively. It is proved that the proposed algorithm is successful in matching remotely sensed high-resolution images acquired with digital cameras. Moreover, the automatization of the basic tasks in image matching and the 3D coordinate acquisition were also achieved by the algorithm.