Assigning tie points to a generalised building model for UAS image orientation

Abstract

This paper addresses the integration of a building model into the pose estimation of image sequences. Images are captured by an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) equipped with a camera flying in between buildings. Two approaches to assign tie points to a generalised building model in object space are presented. A direct approach is based on the distances between the object coordinates of tie points and planes of the building model. An indirect approach first finds planes within the tie point cloud that are subsequently matched to model planes; finally based on these matches, tie points are assigned to model planes. For both cases, the assignments are used in a hybrid bundle adjustment to refine the poses (image orientations). Experimental results for an image sequence demonstrate improvements in comparison to an adjustment without the building model. Differences and limitations of the two approaches for pointplane assignment are discussed - in the experiments they perform similar with respect to estimated standard deviations of tie points.