Proceedings Article | 19 May 2005
Proc. SPIE. 5807, Automatic Target Recognition XV
KEYWORDS: Aerospace engineering, Sensors, Image segmentation, Photography, Image restoration, 3D modeling, Image analysis, Image registration, Image sensors, 3D image processing
The investigation presented in this article continues our long-term efforts directed towards the automatic structural matching of aerospace photographs. An efficient target independent hierarchical structural matching tool was described in our previous paper, which, however, was aimed mostly for the analysis of 2D scenes. It applied the same geometric transformation model to the whole area of image, thus it was nice for the space photographs taken from rather high orbits, but it often failed in the cases when the sensors were positioned near the 3D scenes being observed. Different transformation models should be applied to different parts of images in the last case, and finding a correct separation of image into the areas of homogeneous geometric transformations was the main problem.
Now we succeeded in separating the images of scenes into the surfaces of different objects on the base of their textural and spectral features, thus we have got a possibility of separate matching the sub-images corresponding to such objects applying different transformation model to each such sub-image. Some additional limitations were used in the course of such separation and matching. In particular, the a priory assumptions were applied in different cases about the possible geometry of scenes, rules of illumination and shadowing, thus the aerospace photographs, indoor scenes, or images of aircrafts were analyzed in slightly differing ways. However the additional limitations applied could be considered as very general and are worth to be used in a wide sphere of practical tasks. The automatic image analysis was successful in all considered practical cases.
