Automatic Orthorectification of ASTER Images by Matching Digital Elevation Models", ICIAR 2007, LNCS 4633

Abstract. The ortho-rectification of satellite images is normally a time-consuming and expensive task. It can strongly benefit from automatic or semi-automatic procedures in order to avoid field work for ground control survey. This article presents an automated method to automatically georeference satel-lite images acquired by the ASTER sensor. The method is based on automatic matching of images and Digital Elevation Models (DEM). First a DEM is ex-tracted from the two stereo image bands, which then is matched to the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) DEM in order to correct its position in a map reference system. This allows for the simultaneous correction of image geo-location, which then is followed by the ortho-rectification. The method was applied to an ASTER image from North Portugal and assessed using topog-raphic map data. It was possible to geo-reference images in hilly terrain with positional accuracy better than one pixel.