Camera Geolocation Using Digital Elevation Models in Hilly Area

Abstract

The geolocation of skyline provides an important application in unmanned vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other fields. However, the existing methods are not effective in hilly areas. In this paper, we analyze the difficulties to locate in hilly areas and propose a new geolocation method. According to the vegetation in hilly area, two new skyline features, enhanced angle chain code and lapel point, are proposed. In order to deal with the skyline being close to the camera, we also propose a matching method which incorporates skyline distance heatmap and skyline pyramid. The experimental results show that the proposed method is highly effective in hilly area and has a robust performance against noise and rotation effects.

Fast Geo-Location Method Based on Panoramic Skyline in Hilly Area

“…Based on the previous work, this paper uses lapel points [17], the feature of the cross point between skyline and ridge line (as illustrated in Figure 8), to cluster the DEM skylines in order to accelerate the matching efficiency of panoramic skyline. Furthermore, a new camera orientation estimation method is proposed, which only depends on the image features and the corresponding features of DEM without using external sensors to estimate the camera orientation.…”

“…By calculating the first derivative of the depth value of each point on the DEM skyline [17], we obtain the lapel points of the DEM skylines. The format of each DEM skyline point is shown in Table 1.…”

“…The classification of lapel point type depends on the spatial relationship between the skyline and the ridge line. Compared with the ridge line matching proposed by other scholars, the lapel point reduces the accuracy requirement of ridge line extraction [17]. It only needs to extract the ridge line near the intersection point of ridge line and skyline.…”