Stereo Image Retrieval Using Height and Planar Visual Word Pairs

The wide availability of high-resolution satellite stereo images has created a surging demand for effective stereo image retrieval methods. Recently, few retrieval methods have been designed specifically for stereo images having unique characteristics (e.g., viewing number and viewing angles), and often have insufficient retrieval accuracy. A new content-based stereo image retrieval method is achieved with height and planar visual word pairs, which are generated from the stereo extracted digital surface models and orthoimages. Experimental results of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing stereo benchmark test data set show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and stability. Our method achieves a high retrieval precision of 0.9, and has a high efficiency. Our method is stable for two stereo pairs, covering the same scene from different sensors, which usually have a small ranking difference in the returned ranking list. Our method is helpful to quickly and accurately locate desired stereo images from large quantities of multisensor stereo images.