Automated Regristration of Imagery and DFAD to Digital Elevation Data

The need to register digital imagery and Digital Feature Analysis Data (DFAD) with Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) has been with the digital cartography community since these data have been in use. To date, primarily manual procedures have been available to perform this operation. The objective of this program is an automated system for registering digital imagery and DFAD with DTED. The effort proposed here will use as a starting point a prototype of such a system that has resulted from collaboration between The Ohio State University and BW Technology. This prototype, operating on a Sparc workstation, employs lines extracted from DTED and from a grey-level image to register the two data sets. The process operates automatically after the user identifies windows in the data where common features appear to be present. In Phase I research will be performed to determine how to expand and enhance the methods used in the prototype (1) to accommodate DFAD and other types of imagery, (2) to improve the speed and robustness of the operation and (3) to more fully automate the process. Additional methods of feature extraction and utilization will be evaluated together with other procedures for feature matching and data registration.