Automated Landmark Extraction based on Matching and Robust Estimation with Geostationary Weather Satellite Images

The Communications, Oceanography and Meteorology Satellite(COMS) will be launched in 2008. Ground processing for COMS includes the process of automatic image navigation. Image navigation requires landmark detection by matching COMS images against landmark chips. For automatic image navigation, a matching must be performed automatically. However, if matching results contain errors, the accuracy of image navigation deteriorates. To overcome this problem, we propose use of a robust estimation technique called Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) to automatically detect erroneous matching. We tested GOES-9 satellite images with 30 landmark chips that were extracted from the world shoreline database. After matching, mismatch results were detected automatically by RANSAC. All mismatches were detected correctly by RANSAC with a threshold value of 2.5 pixels.