LAUSR

ABSTRACT Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are the most popular way to collect ground data today, thanks to their low cost and matchless convenience. However, UAVs are prone to unstable flight poses because they are so light in weight, which has resulted in a new challenge for UAV image stitching. In this paper, we propose a robust approach to stitch UAV images captured from approximately planar scenes without pose parameters assistance. The key idea of the proposed framework lies in an effective projection plane selection strategy, which is capable of resisting the perspective distortion from existing pose-perturbed images. To select a reasonable reference image as the projection plane, we first divide all the images into two groups (stable group and unstable group) according to their registration error under the affine model. Then, a specifically designed approach is used to define a weighted topological graph, which guarantees that the reference image is selected from the stable group while maintaining a global minimum accumulated registration error. Based on our cost topological graph, each unstable group image is locally attached to a stable group image via a homography. Finally, alignment parameters of all the stable group images are solved using affine model, after which global optimization is performed on the model of both groups. Comparing our results to those of the conventional approaches indicates that our proposed approach produced superior results in several challenging experiments involving both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.