A Fast Mosaic Approach for Remote Sensing Images

An approach of image mosaic based on binary image region matching is presented and applied in remote sensing serial image processing. Adopted the nearest-neighbour interpolation, the original images are rectified on the basis of the values of external orientation elements of the camera installed on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Image matching includes two procedures, i.e., rough matching and fine matching. In rough matching, the area coverage of overlapped regions between two consecutive images to be stitched is determined approximately at first. Both of the overlapped regions of the two images are processed to binary image, and then the binary images are filtered by mathematic morphologic method. In the appointed binary image region of the former image, feature template is searched and extracted. Through the XOR operation of the feature template and search region, some possible matching positions in the overlapped region of the latter image are obtained. In the fine matching, the sequential similarity detection algorithm (SSDA) is adopted to perform matching computation in the some small regions near the positions extracted in the rough matching, and then the relative position offsets in X-orientation and Y-orientation between the two consecutive images are obtained. Based on the result of the image matching, the two images are stitched. Experimental results by simulation show that the approach presented in the paper greatly improves the operation speed, while the precision remains fine, than it can be applied in real-time mosaicking of serial images.