Epipolar rectification is of great importance for 3D modeling by using UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) images; however, the existing methods seldom consider the perspective distortion relative to surface planes. Therefore, an algorithm for the rectification of oblique images is proposed and implemented in detail. The basic principle is to minimize the rectified images' perspective distortion relative to the reference planes. First, this minimization problem is formulated as a cost function that is constructed by the tangent value of angle deformation; second, it provides a great deal of flexibility on using different reference planes, such as roofs and the façades of buildings, to generate rectified images. Furthermore, a reasonable scale is acquired according to the dihedral angle between the rectified image plane and the original image plane. The low-quality regions of oblique images are cropped out according to the distortion size. Experimental results revealed that the proposed rectification method can result in improved matching precision (Semi-global dense matching). The matching precision is increased by about 30% for roofs and increased by just 1% for façades, while the façades are not parallel to the baseline. In another designed experiment, the selected façades are parallel to the baseline, the matching precision has a great improvement for façades, by an average of 22%. This fully proves our proposed algorithm that elimination of perspective distortion on rectified images can significantly improve the accuracy of dense matching.
Keywords: 3D reconstruction; UAV images; epipolar rectification; minimum perspective distortion; oblique images.