Seamless change detection and mosaicing for aerial imagery

The color appearance of an object can vary widely as a function of camera sensitivity and ambient illumination. In this paper, we discuss a methodology for seamless interfacing across imaging sensors and under varying illumination conditions for two very relevant problems in aerial imaging, namely, change detection and mosaicing. The proposed approach works by estimating surface reflectance which is an intrinsic property of the scene and is invariant to both camera and illumination. We advocate SIFT-based feature detection and matching in the reflectance domain followed by registration. We demonstrate that mosaicing and change detection when performed in the high-dimensional reflectance space yields better results as compared to operating in the 3-dimensional color space.