Sift-based matching of multiple at images

To further increase the degree of automation of modern aerial triangulation and geomatic data acquisition, this paper proposes a new method for multi-image matching based on the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) for aerial triangulation (AT), especially without the need on the input data such as block and strip data for providing image overlap information. To simultaneously deal with a large number of aerial images with large image format in a block area, we proposed both schemes of Quality Filtering (QF) and Affine Transformation Prediction (AFTP) for automatic tie point extraction and measurement with a better and satisfactory efficiency. Some tests are done by using aerial images taken with the RMK DX camera. Also, high precision ground check points are used to evaluate the quality of the results. They demonstrate that the automatic tie point selection and measurement is done efficiently even under the circumstance that no priori-knowledge on image overlap is available. Also, ground check points show that the accuracy of photo coordinates is 0.21 pixels, namely it reaches a subpixel level.