A study on aerial triangulation from multi-sensor imagery

Recently, the enormous increase in the volume of remotely sensed data is being acquired by an ever-growing number of earth observation satellites. The combining of diversely sourced imagery together is an important requirement in many applications such as data fusion, city modeling and object recognition. Aerial triangulation is a procedure to reconstruct object space from imagery. However, since the different kinds of imagery have their own sensor model, characteristics, and resolution, the previous approach in aerial triangulation (or georeferencing) is performed on a sensor model separately. This study evaluated the advantages of aerial triangulation of large number of images from multi-sensors simultaneously. The incorporated multi-sensors are frame, push broom, and whisky broom cameras. The limits and problems of push-broom or whisky broom sensor models can be compensated by combined triangulation with frame imagery and vise versa. The reconstructed object space from multi-sensor triangulation is more accurate than that from a single model. Experiments conducted in this study show the more accurately reconstructed object space from multi-sensor triangulation.