Synthetic aerial image generation for miniature aerial system

Abstract

This paper presents a computer vision based method which generates a synthetic image of the earth as would be viewed by an aerial camera. The method takes geo-referenced, ortho-rectified aerial image database as the source and using a pinhole perspective camera model generates the synthetic image. The method requires the position and attitude of the camera, which act as the extrinsic parameters for the camera model. The intrinsic parameters are chosen to emulate a real camera. Finally, the results of synthetic aerial image generation implemented on MATLAB are presented.