Pose estimation and recognition of ground vehicles in aerial reconnaissance imagery

A surface-based mutual information metric has been proposed by Viola and Wells (1995) to orientate 3D models accurately with 2D imagery in the medical field. In this paper, their objective function is applied and extended to estimate the pose and obtain generic recognition of vehicles in military reconnaissance imagery using appropriate 3D CAD models. Successful orientation and recognition of imaged vehicles has been achieved through the addition of another term to the metric. The new metric term utilises edge information and provides a greater tolerance of initial model translational and rotational offsets