Detecting Matching Blunders of Multi-Source Remote Sensing Images via Graph Theory

Large radiometric and geometric distortion in multi-source images leads to fewer matching points with high matching blunder ratios, and global geometric relationship models between multi-sensor images are inexplicit. Thus, traditional matching blunder detection methods cannot work effectively. To address this problem, we propose two matching blunder detection methods based on graph theory. The proposed methods can build statistically significant clusters in the case of few matching points with high matching blunder ratios, and use local geometric similarity constraints to detect matching blunders when the global geometric relationship is not explicit. The first method (named the complete graph-based method) uses clusters constructed by matched triangles in complete graphs to encode the local geometric similarity of images, and it can detect matching blunders effectively without considering the global geometric relationship. The second method uses the triangular irregular network (TIN) graph to approximate a complete graph to reduce to computational complexity of the first method. We name this the TIN graph-based method. Experiments show that the two graph-based methods outperform the classical random sample consensus (RANSAC)-based method in recognition rate, false rate, number of remaining matching point pairs, dispersion, positional accuracy in simulated and real data (image pairs from Gaofen1, near infrared ray of Gaofen1, Gaofen2, panchromatic Landsat, Ziyuan3, Jilin1and unmanned aerial vehicle). Notably, in most cases, the mean false rates of RANSAC, the complete graph-based method and the TIN graph-based method in simulated data experiments are 0.50, 0.26 and 0.14, respectively. In addition, the mean positional accuracy (RMSE measured in units of pixels) of the three methods is 2.6, 1.4 and 1.5 in real data experiments, respectively. Furthermore, when matching blunder ratio is no higher than 50%, the computation time of the TIN graph-based method is nearly equal to that of the RANSAC-based method, and roughly 2 to 40 times less than that of the complete graph-based method.