On stereo-rectification of pushbroom images

Image stereo pairs obtained from pinhole cameras can be stereo-rectified, thus permitting to test and use the many standard stereo matching algorithms of the literature. Yet, it is well-known that pushbroom Earth observation satellites produce image pairs that are not stereo-rectifiable. Nevertheless, we show that by a new and adequate use of the satellite calibration data, one can perform a precise local stereo-rectification of large Earth images. Based on this we built a fully automatic 3D reconstruction chain for the new Pléiades Earth observation satellite. It produces 1/10 pixel accurate Earth image stereo pairs at a high resolution. Examples will be made available online to the computer vision community.