Experiences of automatic creation of image mosaics and digital surface models using airborne digital camera data

Video cameras and digital cameras have become a more and more attractive data source in airborne remote sensing. The problem has been the huge number of images needed to cover areas of interest in practical applications. Therefore automated methods for patching the many images mosaics are essential. The mapping of the third dimension, the height of the terrain has become a more and more relevant issue in practical applications. 3D information is needed for planning purposes, analysis and visualization. Especially the creation of virtual worlds demands full information. In this paper the first experiences of using a global object reconstruction method for automatic creation of image mosaics and digital terrain or surface models using airborne digital camera data are presented. The global object reconstruction method has been tested on a few sets of digital camera data. The largest data sets have consisted of about 150 images. The results show that the method works well. There are practically no visible geometric errors in the resulting mosaics. Also the radiometric quality of the mosaics is good. The seams between the individual images are therefore mostly invisible.