[IPOL announce] new article: A Generic Bundle Adjustment Methodology for Indirect RPC Model Refinement of Satellite Imagery

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2021/352/

Roger Marí, Carlo de Franchis, Enric Meinhardt-Llopis, Jérémy Anger, and 
Gabriele Facciolo,
A Generic Bundle Adjustment Methodology for Indirect RPC Model 
Refinement of Satellite Imagery,
Image Processing On Line, 11 (2021), pp. 344–373.
https://doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2021.352

Abstract
This article describes a generic bundle adjustment methodology for 
multi-view stereo pipelines for 3D reconstruction from high-resolution 
optical satellite imagery. The Rational Polynomial Camera (RPC) model of 
each input view is refined by composing it with a rotation that 
compensates errors related to the attitude angles encoding the satellite 
orientation. A set of tie points, derived from feature tracks detected 
across the input images, is used to find the optimal corrective 
rotations by minimization of the reprojection error. We evaluate the 
performance of our method using time series of SkySat acquisitions over 
two different areas of interest. As an internal evaluation metric we 
compute the standard deviation between corresponding height estimations 
derived from different stereo pairs, before and after the bundle 
adjustment correction. Lastly, the results are also compared to an 
alternative solution for multi-view stereo pipelines that eludes any 
explicit correction of the camera models by directly registering 
independent dense surface models.