Stereo Vision Based Reconstruction of Huge Urban Areas from an Airborne Pushbroom Camera (HRSC)

This paper considers the application of capturing urban terrain by an airborne pushbroom camera (e.g. High Resolution Stereo Camera). The resulting images as well as disparity ranges are expected to be huge. A slightly non-linear flight path and small orientation changes are anticipated, which results in curved epipolar lines. These images cannot be geometrically corrected for matching purposes such that epipolar lines are exactly straight and parallel to each other. The proposed novel processing solution explicitely calculates epipolar lines for reducing the disparity search range to a minimum. This is a necessary prerequisite for using an accurate, but memory intensive semi global stereo matching method that is based on pixelwise matching. It is shown that the proposed approach performs accurate matching of urban terrain and is efficient on huge images.