A piecewise approach to epipolar resampling of pushbroom satellite images based on RPC

Epipolar line determination and image resampling are important steps for stereo image processing. Unlike frame cameras that have well-known epipolar geometry, the pushbroom camera does not produce straight epipolar lines and the epipolar pair does not exist for the entire scene. These properties make it difficult to establish epipolar geometry of the pushbroom camera for epipolar image resampling. Therefore, some researchers have adopted approximate models to avoid these problems. In this study, a new method for the conjugate epipolar curve pair determination and epipolar resampling of spaceborne pushbroom images based on RPC is proposed. The proposed method assumes that the conjugate epipolar curve pairs exist approximately for the local scene area and the global epipolar pairs can also exist if the local pairs are sequentially linked. Then, epipolar image resampling is established by reassigning the generated conjugate epipolar curve pair points to satisfy the epipolar resampling image condition. Ikonos stereo images are tested for the evaluation, and the proposed method showed a maximum y-parallax of 1.25 pixels for manually measured tie points, while the resampling method by the parallel projection model showed a maximum of 4.59 pixels.