Camera orientation based on matching road networks

The following paper shows an approach to measure orientation data of sensors during an airplane flight for traffic data acquisition. This orientation data is necessary for georegistration of any taken aerial images and extracted features. Since an inertial measurement unit is a very costly component, alternative methods for orientation determination should be considered. In this paper we present an approach achieving this only by using a GPS position and a database of the road network around. It is shown how the roads are extracted in the image considering their color hue and how they are matched to the given database segments. To adjust the rotation angles a simplex optimization algorithm is used. The approach yields convergence rates of more than 96 percent with a rotation error of around 1/4 degree for pitch and roll, which is sufficient for traffic surveillance purpose.