Outlier removal in stereo reconstruction of orbital images

Abstract

NASA has recently been building 3-dimensional models of the moon based on photos taken from orbiting satellites and the Apollo missions. One issue with the stereo reconstruction is the handling of "outliers", or areas with rapid and unexpected change in the data. Outliers may be introduced by issues such as shadows on the surface, areas with low amounts of surface detail, or flaws in the camera systems. These errors may result in elevation spikes which cause the model to differ significantly from accurate ground truth. We are seeking to remove outliers from reconstructions by using a pair of filters which target the characteristics of these outliers. The first filter will use edge detection to filter areas with low detail and the second filter will remove areas in the disparity map which differ too far from their surrounding neighbors. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.