UAV AND LIDAR IMAGE REGISTRATION: A SURF-BASED APPROACH FOR GROUND CONTROL POINTS SELECTION

Abstract. Multisource remote sensing image data provides synthesized information to support many applications including land cover mapping, urban planning, water resource management, and GIS modelling. Effectively utilizing such images however requires proper image registration, which in turn highly relies on accurate ground control points (GCP) selection. This study evaluates the performance of the interest point descriptor SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features) for GCPs selection from UAV and LiDAR images. The main motivation for using SURF is due to it being invariant to scaling, blur and illumination, and partially invariant to rotation and view point changes. We also consider features generated by the Sobel and Canny edge detectors as complements to potentially increase the accuracy of feature matching between the UAV and LiDAR images. From our experiments, the red channel (Band-3) produces the most accurate and practical results in terms of registration, while adding the edge features seems to produce lacklustre results.