Efficient image mosaicing for optical underwater mapping

Owing to the rapid developments on obtaining optical data from areas beyond human reach, there is a high demand from different scientists for creating large-area image mosaics often using images as the only source of information. One of the most important steps in the mosaicing process is the motion estimation between overlapping images to obtain the topology, i.e, the spatial relationships between images. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for feature-based image mosaicing capable of obtaining the topology with a reduced number of matching attempts. It is presented an environmental application of this mosaicing approach to monitoring coral reefs.