An Efficient Matching Method of LiDAR Depth Map and Aerial Image Based on Phase Mean Convolution

  Objectives  Multi-source image matching is primarily disturbed by nonlinear intensity difference, contrast difference and inconspicuous regional structure features, while the significant differences of texture features result in lack of part structure seriously between light detection and ranging(LiDAR)depth map and aerial image, and this problem causes a mutation in the phase extremum, which further increases the difficulty of matching.

  Methods  In this paper, a method of efficient matching of LiDAR depth map and aerial image based on phase mean convolution is proposed. In the image feature matching stage, a histogram of phase mean energy convolution(HPMEC) is established, which extended the phase consistency model in order to solve a mean convolution sequence and phase maximum label map by constructing phase mean energy convolution equation. Then the nearest neighbor matching algorithm was completed the initial match and marginalizing sample consensus plus was used to remove outliers. Based on the thread pool parallel strategy, the images were matched by dividing the overlapping grid. Multiple sets of LiDAR depth map and aerial image with different types of ground coverage are used to as dataset to experiment with position scale orientation-scale invariant feature transform (PSO-SIFT), Log-Gabor histogram descriptor (LGHD), radiation-variation insensitive feature transform (RIFT) and histogram of absolute phase consistency gradients (HAPCG) methods respectively.

  Results  The results show that the performance of HPMEC method is superior to the other four methods in the matching of LiDAR depth map and aerial image, the average running time is 13.3 times of PSO-SIFT, 10.9 times of LGHD, 10.4 times of HAPCG and 7.0 times of RIFT, at the same time the average correct matching points are significantly higher than the other four methods, the root mean square error is lightly better than the other four methods within 1.9 pixels.

  Conclusions  The proposed HPMEC method could achieve efficient and robust matching between LiDAR depth map and aerial image.