Georeferencing Digital Camera Images Using Internal Camera Model

• Main Author: Nagdev, Alok
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: Digital Commons @ University of South Florida 2004
• Subjects: image correlation; attitude; image projection; camera calibration; least squared estimation; American Studies; Arts and Humanities; Airborne Topographic Mapper
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/1174; https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/context/etd/article/2173/viewcontent/SFE0000343.pdf

The NASA Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) is a laser scanning instrument which is used mainly to collect dense topographic data over much of the conterminous US coastline. The inclusion of two digital cameras in consonance with the ATM instrument now gives 3-band (RGB) imagery apart from a very rich topographic data. This imagery, in its crude form, has limited applications due to it being not georeferenced and having a heavy camera lens distortions. As thesis, a processing system - Park-View - is developed to bring this imagery into a more suitable format for the scientists for analytical and interpretational purposes. Park-View utilizes the well gridded elevation data from layer four of another processing system called LaserMap for georeferencing the digital camera images. Camera lens behavior is modeled using a 2D grid image and all of its intrinsic parameters ascertained. These parameters are then incorporated into correcting the lens distortions of georeferenced images. Errors in time-stamping of images and in the mounting angles of the camera are calculated using well known tie-points. Georeferenced images can be stored either in GeoTiff format or jpeg format. Individual images can be georeferenced or put in a mosaic form with the mosaic color equalized for adjoining images. Park-View also provides the main GUI displaying the entire surveyed area, mapper GUI for a batch processing of all the images and a display window for displaying georeferenced images or mosaics. Additional capabilities could be added to the processing system for performing some specific image processing operations on the images such as edge detection and image enhancement.