ASSESSMENT OF INFLUENCE OF IMAGE PROCESSING ON FULLY AUTOMATIC UAV PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Abstract. Nowadays UAVs have been widely used for large scale surveying and mapping. Compared with traditional surveying techniques, UAV photogrammetry is more convenient, cost-effective, and responsive. Aerial images, Position and Orientation System (POS) observations and coordinates of ground control points are usually acquired during a surveying campaign. Aerial images are the data source of feature point extraction, dense matching and ortho-rectification procedures. The quality of the images is one of the most important factors that influence the accuracy and efficiency of UAV photogrammetry. Image processing techniques including image enhancement, image downsampling and image compression are usually used to improve the image quality as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the photogrammetric data processing. However, all of these image processing techniques bring in uncertainties to the UAV photogrammetry. In this work, the influences of the aforementioned image processing techniques on the accuracy of the automatic UAV photogrammetry are investigated. The automatic photogrammetric data processing mainly consists of image matching, relative orientation, absolute orientation, dense matching, DSM interpolation and orthomosaicing. The results of the experiments show that the influences of the image processing techniques on the accuracy of automatic UAV photogrammetry are insignificant. The image orientation and surface reconstruction accuracies of the original and the enhanced images are comparable. The feature points extraction and image matching procedures are greatly influenced by image downsampling. The accuracies of the image orientations are not influenced by image downsampling and image compression at all.