Performance evaluation of scene registration and stereo matching for cartographic feature extraction

Three major areas in the development of competent 3-D scene interpretation system are discussed. First, the importance of accurate automatic scene registration and the difficulty in automated extraction and matching of scene reference points are described. Second, the authors describe two stereo matching algorithms, S1, which is an area-based matcher previously used in the SPAM system, and S2, which is a feature-based matching algorithm based on hierarchical waveform matching. Third, the authors introduce several performance evaluation metrics that made it possible to measure the quality of the overall scene recovery, the building disparity estimate, and the quality and sharpness of the building delineations. Such manually generated scene reference models are critical for understanding strengths and weaknesses of various matching algorithms and in the incremental development of improvements to existing algorithms. Experiments were performed on difficult examples of aerial imagery