Coral reef mosaicking using Teardrop and Fast Image Labeling

In this paper, we present an inexpensive system for diverless video capture and fast image stitching of image frames for rapid reef assessment of shallow coral reefs. Our system has two main components: 1) Teardrop, a boat-towable, winged hull apparatus designed to house a commercial digital camera, and 2) a mosaicking algorithm to stitch the coral reef video into mosaics for further appreciation and analysis. The captured reef video is then separated into image frames which are to be stitched sequentially using Fast Image Labeling. The overlap between image frames is estimated using Single-Step DFT, an efficient sub-pixel estimation algorithm. The estimated overlap is used to compute for the area to be added to the mosaic space. The overlapping section between succeeding image-pairs are stitched along a seam determined by a minimal-cost path using dynamic programming. The visibility of the seam boundaries is further minimized by utilizing blending on multi-resolution splines. Experimental results on automated reef mosaics creation from actual coral reef video taken using Teardrop shows the performance of the system described. The main contribution of this work is the demonstration of a rapid reef visualization system using a diverless system and commercially available, non-research-grade imaging equipment.