A robust method for automatic panoramic UAV image mosaic

Abstract

This paper introduces a robust method for panoramic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image mosaic. In the traditional automatic panoramic image stitching method (Autostitch), it assumes that the camera rotates about its optical centre and the group of transformations the source images may undergo is a special group of homographies. It is rare to get such ideal data in reality. In particular, remote sensing images obtained by UAV do not satisfy such an ideal situation, where the images may not be on a plane yet and even may suffer from nonrigid changes, leading to poor mosaic results. To overcome the above mentioned challenges, in this paper a nonrigid matching algorithm is introduced to the mosaic system to generate accurate feature matching on remote sensing images. We also propose a new strategy for bundle adjustment to make the mosaic system suitable for the UAV image panoramic mosaic effect. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the traditional method and some of the latest methods in terms of visual effect.