MONOCULAR DEPTH ESTIMATION OF GOOGLE EARTH IMAGES USING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract. Depth estimation from images is an important task using scene understanding and reconstruction. Recently, encoder-decoder type fully convolutional architectures have gained great success in the area of depth estimation. Depth extraction from aerial and satellite images is one of the important topics in photogrammetry and remote sensing. This is usually done using image pairs, or more than two images. Solving this problem using a single image is still a challenging problem and has not been completely solved. Several convolutional neural networks have been proposed to extract depth from a single image, which act as encoders and decoders. In this article, we use one of these networks, which has performed well for depth estimation, in order to extract height from aerial and satellite images. Our main goal is to investigate the performance of Google Earth satellite data in order to produce a digital elevation model. At first, we extracted the digital model of the target area using ISPRS benchmark data, then we did the same thing using Google Earth satellite images. The paper presents a convolutional neural network for computing a high-resolution depth map given a single RGB Google Earth image. The results show the proper performance of Google Earth satellite images for height extraction. We achieved values of 2.07 m and 0.36 m for the RMS and REL metrics, respectively, which are very comparable and acceptable to the values of 2.04 m and 0.39 m obtained from the ISPRS benchmark images.