Fast Anchor Point Matching for Emergency UAV Image Stitching Using Position and Pose Information

Abstract

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) techniques, UAV images are becoming more widely used. However, as an essential step of UAV image application, the computation of stitching remains time intensive, especially for emergency applications. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel approach to use the position and pose information of UAV images to speed up the process of image stitching, called FUIS (fast UAV image stitching). This stitches images by feature points. However, unlike traditional approaches, our approach rapidly finds several anchor-matches instead of a lot of feature matches to stitch the image. Firstly, from a large number of feature points, we design a method to select a small number of them that are more helpful for stitching as anchor points. Then, a method is proposed to more quickly and accurately match these anchor points, using position and pose information. Experiments show that our method significantly reduces the time consumption compared with the-state-of-art approaches with accuracy guaranteed.

A Parallax Image Mosaic Method for Low Altitude Aerial Photography with Artifact and Distortion Suppression

“…The current aerial image mosaic methods are generally divided into two categories, namely, image feature based stitching method and UAV position and attitude information based stitching method [ 2 ]. Ruizhe Shao et al proposed a fast UAV image stitching method that uses the position and attitude information of UAV images to improve the speed of image stitching [ 3 ]. This method can quickly find several anchor points to match to stitch images.…”

Fast UAV Image Mosaicking by a Triangulated Irregular Network of Bucketed Tiepoints

“…Image-based mosaicking carries out image resampling based on the geometry among images [8,9]. The geometry among images can be estimated by precisely extracting tiepoints [10,11]. This approach does not use a terrain model and instead assumes a planar surface for mosaicking.…”