Uav Image Mosaic Based on Non-Rigid Matching and Bundle Adjustment

Abstract

This study introduces a robust method for panoramic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image mosaic. The traditional automatic panoramic image stitching method requires the camera to carefully rotate the optical center to obtain an image, but the image used for mosaic in reality cannot easily achieve this ideal state. In particular, remote sensing images obtained by UAVs do not satisfy such a situation. The images may not be on a plane yet, and several of them may even have non-rigid changes. Therefore, the classical method of UAV image stitching is expected to produce poor results. To this end, we improve the traditional stitching method to overcome the abovementioned challenges. Specifically, a non-rigid matching algorithm is introduced to the system to make it suitable for remote sensing images. We perform bundle adjustments using a new strategy to make the mosaic system suitable for UAV images. Experimental results show that our method is more robust than the traditional method.