Automatic Generation of Seamline Network Using Area Voronoi Diagrams With Overlap

The mosaicking of orthoimages has been used to cover a large geographic region for various applications ranging from environmental monitoring to disaster management. However, existing mosaicking methods mainly focus on the generation of seamlines between two adjacent orthoimages. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on the use of a seamline network formed by a novel area Voronoi diagrams with overlap and the use of effective mosaic polygons (EMPs) to define the pixels of each orthoimage for the final mosaic. The generated seamline network is global based and is also optimized after refinement. It gives an effective partitioning for the regions of all orthoimages to form EMPs. The partitioning is unique, seamless, and has no redundancy. The algorithm is parallel, and the EMP of each orthoimage only has relation to orthoimages which have overlaps with it. It can ensure the flexibility and efficiency of mosaicking, without an intermediate process and independent of the sequence of the image composite. The experimental results obtained from the mosaicking of 40 color orthoimages demonstrate considerable potential for generating a seamline network automatically and effectively. This is extremely useful when a seamless mosaic is required to cover a large geographic region.