Registration of video to geo-referenced imagery

The ability to locate scenes and objects visible in aerial video imagery with their corresponding locations and coordinates in a reference coordinate system is important in visually-guided navigation, surveillance and monitoring systems. However, a key technical problem of locating objects and scenes in a video with their geo-coordinates needs to be solved in order to ascertain the geo-location of objects seen from the camera platform's current location. We present the key algorithms for the problem of accurate mapping between camera coordinates and geo-coordinates, called geo-spatial registration. Current systems for geo-location use the position and attitude information for the moving platform in some fixed world coordinates to locate the video frames in the reference database. However, the accuracy achieved is only of the order of 100s of pixels. Our approach utilizes the imagery and terrain information contained in the geo-spatial database to precisely align dynamic videos with the reference imagery and thus achieves a much higher accuracy. Applications of geo-spatial registration include aerial mapping, target location and tracking and enhanced visualization such as the overlay of textual/graphical annotations of objects of interest in the current video using the stored annotations in the reference database.