Target Three-Dimensional Reconstruction From the Multi-View Radar Image Sequence

Target three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is a hot topic and also a challenge in remote sensing applications. In this paper, a new reconstruction algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the 3D surface of the stable attitude target from its multi-view radar image sequence. Uniform explicit expression of the radar and optical imaging geometries is derived to bridge the 3D target structure and these two sorts of observation images. In this way, the visual hull of the target is reconstructed by exploiting the multi-view stereo techniques to the silhouette information extracted from the radar image sequence. Meanwhile, the target absolute attitude is also determined. Furthermore, we analyze the primary difficulty of the method induced from the limited radar observation view in a typical application, the 3D reconstruction of an in-orbit satellite. Then, an extended algorithm is proposed with the feature fusion of the radar and optical images to achieve dramatic performance enhancement of the reconstruction in this condition. The feasibility of the proposed algorithm is confirmed in the experiment part, and some conclusions are drawn to guide the future work about extended applications of the proposed algorithm as well.