Geometric exploration of virtual planes in a fusion-based 3D data registration framework

Three-dimensional reconstruction of objects, particularly buildings, within an aerial scene is still a challenging computer vision task and an importance component of Geospatial Information Systems. In this paper we present a new homography-based approach for 3D urban reconstruction based on virtual planes. A hybrid sensor consisting of three sensor elements including camera, inertial (orientation) sensor (IS) and GPS (Global Positioning System) location device mounted on an airborne platform can be used for wide area scene reconstruction. The heterogeneous data coming from each of these three sensors are fused using projective transformations or homographies. Due to inaccuracies in the sensor observations, the estimated homography transforms between inertial and virtual 3D planes have measurement uncertainties. The modeling of such uncertainties for the virtual plane reconstruction method is described in this paper. A preliminary set of results using simulation data is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.