View article

This paper introduces a practical approach to register large-scale GIS imagery to a database of road vectors automatically. The proposed approach breaks the global alignment problem into a set of localized domains (tiles). Within each tile, the displacement between imagery and vectors is approximated by a translation. Finally, a global thin-plate-spline warp based on these local approximations is applied to register the imagery to the vector data.

The critical step in this approach is a fully automatic algorithm to compute the best imagery-to-vectors translation within a tile. The proposed algorithm performs vector-guided extraction of road features, aggregates features obtained in the neighborhood of multiple vectors, and then estimates the best translation through a least-squares optimization applied to a selected subset of the aggregated features. It also computes a confidence value for each processed image tile, so …