A Synthetic 3D Scene for the Validation of Photogrammetric Algorithms

Abstract

This paper describes the construction and composition of a synthetic test world for the validation of photogrammetric algorithms. Since its 3D objects are entirely generated by software, the geometric accuracy of the scene does not suffer from measurement errors which existing real-world ground truth is inherently afflicted with. The resulting data set covers an area of 13188 by 6144 length units and exposes positional residuals as small as the machine epsilon of the double-precision floating point numbers used exclusively for the coordinates. It is colored with high-resolution textures to accommodate the simulation of virtual flight campaigns with large optical sensors and laser scanners in both aerial and close-range scenarios. To specifically support the derivation of image samples and point clouds, the synthetic scene gets stored in the human-readable Alias/Wavefront OBJ and POV-Ray data formats. While conventional rasterization remains possible, using the open-source ray tracer as a render tool facilitates the creation of ideal pinhole bitmaps, consistent digital surface models (DSMs), true ortho-mosaics (TOMs) and orientation metadata without programming knowledge. To demonstrate the application of the constructed 3D scene, example validation recipes are discussed in detail for a state-of-the-art implementation of semi-global matching and a perspective-correct multi-source texture mapper. For the latter, beyond the visual assessment, a statistical evaluation of the achieved texture quality is given.