3D Terrain Reconstruction from Aerial Images

(Supproted by Natural Science Foundation of China, National Romote Sensing Center of China)

   

Scientific Goals

Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or triggered automatically. Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, balloons, blimps and dirigibles, kites, poles, parachutes, and vehicle mounted poles.

3D terrain reconstruction from aerial images is an important problem in computer vision application engineering. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from airplane, we can automatically generate a dense but faithful 3D point cloud model ( played traditional DEM role). Our system needs neither ground control points nor the pose information of the airlpane.

Some Results

 

Fig.1 3D terrain of the Golden bay of Ningxia province from 145 aerial images

 

 

 

Fig. 2 3D terrain of Luoyang gymnasium from 153 aerial images