An image matching algorithm integrating global SRTM and image segmentation for multi-source satellite imagery

Abstract

This paper presents a novel image matching method for multi-source satellite images, which integrates global Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data and image segmentation to achieve robust and numerous correspondences. This method first generates the epipolar lines as a geometric constraint assisted by global SRTM data, after which the seed points are selected and matched. To produce more reliable matching results, a region segmentation-based matching propagation is proposed in this paper, whereby the region segmentations are extracted by image segmentation and are considered to be a spatial constraint. Moreover, a similarity measure integrating Distance, Angle and Normalized Cross-Correlation (DANCC), which considers geometric similarity and radiometric similarity, is introduced to find the optimal correspondences. Experiments using typical satellite images acquired from Resources Satellite-3 (ZY-3), Mapping Satellite-1, SPOT-5 and Google Earth demonstrated that the proposed method is able to produce reliable and accurate matching results.