Manned aircraft has long been used for capturing large-scale aerial images, yet the high costs and weather dependence restrict its availability in emergency situations. In recent years, MAV (Micro Aerial Vehicle) emerged as a novel modality for aerial image acquisition. Its maneuverability and flexibility enable a rapid awareness of the scene of interest. Since these two platforms deliver scene information from different scale and different view, it makes sense to fuse these two types of complimentary imagery to achieve a quick, accurate and detailed description of the scene, which is the main concern of real-time situation awareness. This paper proposes a method to fuse multi-view and multi-scale aerial imagery by establishing a common reference frame. In particular, common features among MAV images and geo-referenced airplane images can be extracted by a scale invariant feature detector like SIFT. From the tie point of geo-referenced images we derive the coordinate of corresponding ground points, which are then utilized as ground control points in global bundle adjustment of MAV images. In this way, the MAV block is aligned to the reference frame. Experiment results show that this method can achieve fully automatic geo-referencing of MAV images even if GPS/IMU acquisition has dropouts, and the orientation accuracy is improved compared to the GPS/IMU based georeferencing. The concept for a subsequent 3D classification method is also described in this paper.
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