Tracking of Vector Roads for the Determination of Seams in Aerial Image Mosaics

This letter proposes a novel approach using vector roads to aid in generating seams for aerial image mosaicking. A representative seam of two adjacent images is extracted as follows. First, the vector roads in the overlapping area of adjacent images are overlaid with the straight skeleton of the overlapping area to build a weighted graph G(V, E). Dijkstra´s algorithm is then applied to And the lowest cost path in G(V, E) that connects two intersections of the boundary polygons of adjacent images. The lowest cost path is considered as a seam candidate. Second, the seam candidate is refined by considering its surrounding pixels. The refined seam is employed as the final seam. Experiments demonstrate that this vector-based approach is typically more efficient than the existing raster-based approaches, particularly when vector road networks are available.