Visual target overlay technique by matching 3D satellite image and ground-based sensor image

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a virtual target overlay technique which does not use a virtual image, but displays a virtual target on ground-based CCD image by appointed scenario for a realistic training simulation. First, we created a realistic 3D model by using high resolution Geographic Tag Image File Format(GeoTIFF) satellite image and Digital Terrain Elevation Data(DTED), and extract the road area from a given sensor image. Satellite image and ground-based sensor image have many differences in observation position, resolution, and scale, thus yielding many difficulties in feature-based matching. Hence, we propose a moving synchronization technique that projects the target on the sensor image according to the marked moving path on 3D satellite image by applying Thin-Plate-Spline(TPS) interpolation function, which an image warping function, on the wo given sets of corresponding control point pair. The experimental results revealed the effectiveness of proposed algorithm.