Benchmarking High Density Image Matching for Oblique Airborne Imagery

Abstract. Both, improvements in camera technology and new pixel-wise matching approaches triggered the further development of software tools for image based 3D reconstruction. Meanwhile research groups as well as commercial vendors provide photogrammetric software to generate dense, reliable and accurate 3D point clouds and Digital Surface Models (DSM) from highly overlapping aerial images. In order to evaluate the potential of these algorithms in view of the ongoing software developments, a suitable test bed is provided by the ISPRS/EuroSDR initiative Benchmark on High Density Image Matching for DSM Computation. This paper discusses the proposed test scenario to investigate the potential of dense matching approaches for 3D data capture from oblique airborne imagery. For this purpose, an oblique aerial image block captured at a GSD of 6 cm in the west of Zürich by a Leica RCD30 Oblique Penta camera is used. Within this paper, the potential test scenario is demonstrated using matching results from two software packages, Agisoft PhotoScan and SURE from University of Stuttgart. As oblique images are frequently used for data capture at building facades, 3D point clouds are mainly investigated at such areas. Reference data from terrestrial laser scanning is used to evaluate data quality from dense image matching for several facade patches with respect to accuracy, density and reliability.