UAV Image Mosaicking Based on Multiregion Guided Local Projection Deformation

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing 2020, Vol.13, p.3844-3855
• Main Authors: Xu, Quan, Chen, Jun, Luo, Linbo, Gong, Wenping, Wang, Yong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Apexes; Cameras; Deformable models; Deformation; Feature extraction; Image classification; Image matching; local projection; Low altitude; Mathematical analysis; Misalignment; Mosaics; multiple regions; Parallax; Regions; Remote sensing; Stitching; Strain; Tall buildings; Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image mosaicking; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 1939-1404; 2151-1535
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3006289

The goal of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image mosaicking is to create natural- looking mosaics without artifacts due to the parallax of the image and relative camera motion. UAV remote sensing is a low-altitude technology and the UAV imaged scene is not effectively planar, yielding parallax on the images. Moreover, when an object in 3-D is mapped to an image plane, different surfaces have different projections. These projections vary with the viewpoint in a sequence of UAV images, which causes artifacts near some tall buildings in the stitched images. To solve these problems, we propose a novel stitching method based on multiregion guided local projection deformation, which can significantly reduce ghosting due to these projections vary with the viewpoint and the parallax. In the proposed method, the image is initially meshed and each cell corresponds to a local homography for image matching, which can reduce misalignment artifacts in the results compared with 2-D projective transforms or global homography. Then, we divide the overlapping regions of input images into multiple regions by classifying feature points. The partitioned regions which serve well scene constraints, are employed to guide the calculation of local homography. Specifically, instead of calculating local homography by the distance between all the feature points in the image and the vertices of the grid, we propose a strategy where multiple regions have different weights for calculating local homography, which can significantly reduce ghosting near some tall buildings. The benefits of the proposed approach are demonstrated using a variety of challenging cases.