Support system to extract tie points in airborne images of snow covered area using roots of single trees

While we can obtain very high spatial resolution images using airborne remote sensing, highly accurate image registration is needed to make a mosaic, conduct time series analysis, and so on, using such very high spatial resolution images. Thus, we developed a support system for highly accurate image registration for airborne images of a snow covered area. This system is composed of feature point extraction and tie point extraction using the feature points. First, we extracted roots of single trees in a forest area and dark spots in snow covered area where there is no tree as feature points. And we matched the extracted points using our developed method. Using the system, the man-hour of image registration could be reduced to shorter than 10% using the method.