Incorporation of Scene Geometry in Least Squares Correlation Matching for DEM Generation from Linear Pushbroom Images

Stereo matching is one of the most crucial parts in DEM generation. Naive stereo matching algorithms often create many holes and blunders in a DEM and therefore a carefully designed strategy must be employed to guide stereo matching algorithms to produce “good” 3D information. In this paper, we describe one such a strategy designed by the use of scene geometry, in particular, the epipolarity for generation of a DEM from linear pushbroom images. The epipolarity for perspective images is a well-known property, i.e., in a stereo image pair, a point in the reference image will map to a line in the search image uniquely defined by sensor models of the image pair. This concept has been utilized in stereo matching by applying epipolar resampling prior to matching. However, the epipolar matching for linear pushbroom images is rather complicated. It was found that the epipolarity can only be described by a Hyperbola- shaped curve and that epipolar resampling cannot be applied to linear pushbroom images. Instead, we have developed an algorithm of incorporating such epipolarity directly in least squares correlation matching. Experiments showed that this approach could improve the quality of a DEM.