Real Time Incremental Image Mosaicking Without Use of Any Camera Parameter

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to support a wide variety of missions, such as remote surveillance, vehicle tracking, and object detection. For problems involving processing of areas larger than a single image, the mosaicking of UAV imagery is a necessary step. Real-time image mosaicking is used for missions that requires fast response like search and rescue missions. It typically requires information from additional sensors, such as Global Position System (GPS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), to facilitate direct orientation, or 3D reconstruction approaches to recover the camera poses. This paper proposes a UAV-based system for real-time creation of incremental mosaics which does not require either direct or indirect camera parameters such as orientation information. Inspired by previous approaches, in the mosaicking process, feature extraction from images, matching of similar key points between images, finding homography matrix to warp and align images, and blending images to obtain mosaics better looking, plays important roles in the achievement of the high quality result. Edge detection is used in the blending step as a novel approach. Experimental results show that real-time incremental image mosaicking process can be completed satisfactorily and without need for any additional camera parameters.