Stereo matching for large-scale high-resolution satellite images using new tiling technique

Stereo matching has been grabbing the attention of researchers because it plays an important role in computer vision, remote sensing and photogrammetry. Although most methods perform well with small size images, experiments applying them to large-scale data sets under uncontrolled conditions are still lacking. In this paper, we present an empirical study on stereo matching for large-scale high-resolution satellite images. A new method is studied to solve the problem of huge size and memory requirement when dealing with large-scale high resolution satellite images. Integrating the tiling technique with the well-known dynamic programming and coarse-to-fine pyramid scheme as well as using memory wisely, the suggested method can be utilized for huge stereo satellite images. Analyzing 350 points from an image of size of 8192 x 8192, disparity results attain an acceptable accuracy with RMS error of 0.5459. Taking the trade-off between computational aspect and accuracy, our method gives an efficient stereo matching for huge satellite image files.