International Journal of Aerospace Engineering (Jan 2022)

Fast Matching Method of UAV Aerial Photography Enhanced Low Illumination Image

  • Wenyao Li,
  • Guangqing Liu,
  • Kuan Lu,
  • Pengyun Chen,
  • Junjie Cui,
  • Mingrang Yu,
  • Peng Shen

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/9543893
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2022

Abstract

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Aiming at the problems of insufficient image contrast in three-dimensional reconstruction of UAV in low illumination environment and the unstable iteration times of the RANSAC algorithm in the feature matching process, real-time matching method of UAV aerial image is proposed. First, a new image enhancement algorithm is applied to the image to enhance its quality and visibility. Second, the enhanced fast algorithm in ORB extracts the feature points from the preprocessed image, and cross-matching performs rough matching. Finally, the PROSAC algorithm solves the homography matrix by selecting the highest quality interior points from the extracted feature points. To improve the matching accuracy, some exterior points that do not conform to the geometric characteristics of the image are removed based on the homography matrix and the set mismatch threshold. The results show that the improved ORB algorithm is applied to the low illumination environment of UAV aerial photography, the image matching accuracy in 3D reconstruction is improved, and the correct matching rate tends to 97.24~99.39%. The relevant research findings and conclusions provide a fast and effective method for UAV image matching in different low illumination environments.