Phase Sensitive Cueing for 3D Objects in Overhead Images
David W. Paglieroni · 2005
Locating specific 3D objects in overhead images is an important problem in many remote sensing applications. 3D objects may contain either one connected component or multiple disconnected components. Solutions must accommodate images acquired with diverse sensors at various times of the day, in various seasons of the year, or under various weather conditions. Moreover, the physical manifestation of a 3D object with fixed physical dimensions in an overhead image is highly dependent on object physical dimensions, object position/orientation, image spatial resolution, and imaging geometry (e.g., obliqueness). This paper describes a two-stage computer-assisted approach for locating 3D objects in overhead images. In the matching stage, the computer matches models of 3D objects to overhead images. The strongest degree of match over all object orientations is computed at each pixel. Unambiguous local maxima in the degree of match as a function of pixel location are then found. In the cueing stage, the computer sorts image thumbnails in descending order of figure-of-merit and presents them to human analysts for visual inspection and interpretation. The figure-of-merit associated with an image thumbnail is computed from the degrees of match to a 3D object model associated with unambiguous local maxima that lie within the thumbnail. This form of computer assistance is invaluable when most of the relevant thumbnails are highly ranked, and the amount of inspection time needed is much less for the highly ranked thumbnails than for images as a whole.