Real-time aerial image mosaicing

Abstract

This paper describes a scheme for seamlessly stitching together images captured from an aerial platform, in real-time, in order to provide an operator with a larger field-of-view. Both recent images, and images from earlier in a flight are used. To obtain real-time performance several of the latest computer vision techniques are applied: firstly the Bag-of-Words image representation allows overlapping images to be found efficiently, and provides cheap wide-baseline correspondences between them. Secondly the BaySAC robust estimation framework allows images to be registered efficiently from a prior motion model combined with large numbers of potential matches between cheap image patch descriptors. Thirdly an efficient seam-placement algorithm allows the rendering of a visually attractive mosaic. Results are presented on a sequence of high-resolution images captured from a microlight.