Research on Multiview Stereo Mapping Based on Satellite Video Images

In recent years, video satellite technology has greatly developed, and satellite video is captured using this technology. Because video satellites in motion are consistently aimed at certain areas, satellite video is usually composed of a series of frame images of the same area with different viewing angles; these satellite video images have different base-height ratios with each other, which makes multiview stereo mapping possible. This paper presents a method of multiview stereo mapping based on satellite video images to generate a digital surface model (DSM), digital elevation model (DEM), and digital ortho map (DOM) and analyzes the influence of different numbers and different viewing angles of satellite video images involved in multiview stereo mapping on the quality of the results. Satellite video images of Urumqi, China, captured by the “Jilin-1” video-03 satellite, were used as experimental data for the verification of the proposed method, and the results of the experiment show that: a high-quality DSM, DEM, and DOM can be generated by multiview stereo mapping based on two or more satellite video images, and the elevation precision and plane precision of the DEM results are 2.751 m and 2.419 m, respectively; such as in traditional stereo mapping, the larger the base-height ratio of the images involved in the calculation is, the higher the elevation precision of the DSM results will be within a certain extent. When the images participating in the calculation comprise images viewed from the nadir direction, forward direction and backward direction at the same time, DSM results with better building textures can be generated with high precision, and as the number of satellite video images increases, the building textures in the DSM results are optimized.