Parallel bundle adjustment of high-resolution satellite imagery

Bundle adjustment is the process of minimizing errors in camera and three-dimensional structure parameters which is applicable to many areas of geospatial perception, computer vision, robotics, and imaging, including terrestrial imaging and remote sensing. In the case of remote sensing and planetary imaging, current methods do not adequately address geographic areas consisting of a large number of images and image observations. Other application domains focus on the single part of the bundle adjustment process, the solution of a linear system, but ignore the computation of the coefficient matrix. In this paper, we propose a fully parallel approach to the bundle adjustment problem. This approach includes parallel computation of the required partial derivatives, which also addresses load-imbalance inherent in the problem, a parallel solution to the required linear system. Experimental results show that the parallel derivative method achieves a high level of parallel efficiency.