A Multi-View Dense Image Matching Method for High-Resolution Aerial Imagery Based on a Graph Network

Multi-view dense matching is a crucial process in automatic 3D reconstruction and mapping applications. In this paper, we present a robust and effective multi-view dense matching algorithm for high-resolution aerial images based on a graph network. The overlap ratio and intersection angle between image pairs are used to find candidate stereo pairs and build the graph network. A Coarse-to-Fine strategy based on an improved Semi-Global Matching algorithm is applied for disparity computation across stereo pairs. Based on the constructed graph, point clouds of base views are generated by triangulating all connected image nodes, followed by a fusion process with the average reprojection error as a priority measure. The proposed method was successfully applied in experiments on aerial image test dataset provided by the ISPRS of Vaihingen, Germany and an oblique nadir image block of Zurich, Switzerland, using three kinds of matching configurations. The proposed method was compared to other state-of-art methods, SURE and PhotoScan. The results demonstrate that the proposed method delivers matches at higher completeness, efficiency, and accuracy than the other methods tested; the RMS for average reprojection error reached the sub pixel level and the actual positioning deviation was better than 1.5 GSD.