Automated Georeferencing of Historic Aerial Photography
Kim Js, Christopher Chan Miller, James Bethel · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 2010
Historic aerial photos are typically very popular, sought-after collections in library archives.Their ability to be used in GIS is limited, however, by the laborious and painstaking georeferencing process.A method is presented for automating the georeferencing of historic aerial photography.In this method, the Harris Corner Detector is used to detect corner points in already-georeferenced and unreferenced aerial photos, which are then matched by cross correlation.Falsely-matched corner points are removed with the application of the Random Sample Consensus with a six parameter transformation.The pixel arrays of inlier corner point pairs are input to a Java program developed with ArcObjects, which converts their pixel coordinates to map coordinates.The unreferenced aerial photos are then rectified and georeferenced by a Warp() function with a first order polynomial option.The results of tests thus far indicate the method is satisfactory and promises to be an important component in an aerial photo library digitization workflow.