A height inversion scheme of cylindrical oil tank with single high-resolution image

Accurate extraction of the height of tanks based on remote sensing images is very important in engineering applications. An efficient scheme to extract the height of oil tanks based on a single high-resolution satellite images with same-name-arc-distance (SNAD) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, image enhancement and geometric correction are carried out on remote sensing images with oil tanks, which makes the image not only have spatial geographic information, but also sharpens the boundaries of the shadows of oil tanks. Secondly, the technology of automatic detection and interpretation by experts for the boundaries of oil tanks’ shadows was used to identify and locate the same-name-arc-edge (SNAE). Thirdly, SNAD was proposed and the value of SNAD was calculated using the coordinate model of same-name-arc-point (SNAP). Finally, the heights of oil tanks can be extracted by using a new cylinder height measuring model. In order to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed scheme, four sub-meter satellite images at different times were used to measure the heights of the same oil tank. Experiments show that SNAD is not only easy to interact and operate, but also has high precision and low computation complexity. Therefore, it would be very useful in engineering applications.