Multi-View Large-Scale Bundle Adjustment Method for High-Resolution Satellite Images

Given enough multi-view image corresponding points (also called tie points) and ground control points (GCP), bundle adjustment for high-resolution satellite images is used to refine the orientations or most often used geometric parameters Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) of each satellite image in a unified geodetic framework, which is very critical in many photogrammetry and computer vision applications. However, the growing number of high resolution spaceborne optical sensors has brought two challenges to the bundle adjustment: 1) images come from different satellite cameras may have different imaging dates, viewing angles, resolutions, etc., thus resulting in geometric and radiometric distortions in the bundle adjustment; 2) The large-scale mapping area always corresponds to vast number of bundle adjustment corrections (including RPC bias and object space point coordinates). Due to the limitation of computer memory, it is hard to refine all corrections at the same time. Hence, how to efficiently realize the bundle adjustment in large-scale regions is very important. This paper particularly addresses the multi-view large-scale bundle adjustment problem by two steps: 1) to get robust tie points among different satellite images, we design a multi-view, multi-source tie point matching algorithm based on plane rectification and epipolar constraints, which is able to compensate geometric and local nonlinear radiometric distortions among satellite datasets, and 2) to solve dozens of thousands or even millions of variables bundle adjustment corrections in the large scale bundle adjustment, we use an efficient solution with only a little computer memory. Experiments on in-track and off-track satellite datasets show that the proposed method is capable of computing sub-pixel accuracy bundle adjustment results.