Registering aerial photographs of farmland with satellite imagery

This paper presents a novel approach for registration of aerial and satellite farmland imagery. We have used field junctions as features for registration. Geometric properties of a group of neighboring fields connected to the junction are used as junction descriptor. These properties are calculated by fitting a rectangle to the field. Junction descriptor contains a group of field patterns capable of finding its match and indexing aerial image spatial location in satellite images in spite of repetitive structure of fields. It is invariant to in-plane rotation, scale and translation. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of our approach against the junction localization errors and the errors introduced by splitting and/or merging of fields.