Abstract
Modern satellites tag their images with geolocation information using GPS and star tracking systems. Depending on the quality of the geopositioning equipment, errors may range from a few meters to tens of meters on the ground. At the current state of art, there is no established method to automatically correct these errors limiting the large-scale joint utilization of cross-platform satellite images. In this paper, an automatic geolocation correction framework that corrects images from multiple satellites simultaneously is presented. As a result of the proposed correction process, all the images are effectively registered to the same absolute geodetic coordinate frame. The usability and the quality of the correction framework are demonstrated through a 3-D surface reconstruction application. The 3-D surface models given by original satellite geopositioning metadata, and the corrected metadata, are compared. The quality difference is measured through an entropy-based metric applied to the orthographic height maps given by the 3-D surface models. Measuring the absolute accuracy of the framework is harder due to lack of publicly available high-precision ground surveys. However, the geolocation of images of exemplar satellites from different parts of the globe are corrected, and the road networks given by OpenStreetMap are projected onto the images using original and corrected metadata to demonstrate the improved quality of alignment.
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For the experiments in this paper, the satellite with the best geolocation accuracy is GeoEye-1.
Note that in this paper, ASTER DEM tiles (30 m resolution) are also used albeit only to set reasonable estimates for minimum and maximum elevations in a given area and to provide a rough ground plane to constrain the search for registration.
A viable range for Z values, \(\left[ {\hbox {Z}_{{min}} ,\hbox {Z}_{{max}} } \right] \), is retrieved from the image metadata.
The height of the scene volume is denoted as 80+ m in Fig. 7a as it changes with respect to the terrain.
Note that the orthographic height maps have 1 m GSD so the patches are 5 pixel by 5 pixel in the map image. To compute the entropy of a patch, 25 height values in the range [0.255] are collected in a histogram with 16 bins. The entropy of the patch histogram is computed as \(H=-\sum _{i=0}^{15}p_{i}\log p_{i}\) where \(p_{i}\) is the normalized bin count.
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Acknowledgments
Supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), contract FA8650-12-C-7211. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon.
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Communicated by Riad I. Hammoud, Josef Sivic, Larry S. Davis, Marc Pollefeys.
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Ozcanli, O.C., Dong, Y., Mundy, J.L. et al. Automatic Geolocation Correction of Satellite Imagery. Int J Comput Vis 116, 263–277 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0852-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0852-7