Globally consistent alignment for mosaicking aerial images

In this paper, we present a robust method to efficiently create a globally consistent and seamless mosaic from aerial images. Firstly, a globally consistent registration strategy is proposed to align the aerial images in a common coordinate system, which combines the affine model with the homographic model effectively. To suppress the accumulation of perspective distortions induced by a sequential set of aerial images taken from a wide-range region, we proposed to initially align each image by an affine model and then perform a homographic refinement in groups to increase the global consistency. Secondly, to efficiently conceal the parallax between aligned images in overlap regions with large depth differences where it is impossible to recover a highly accurate consistent image registration, a novel optimized seamline detection algorithm in the graph cuts energy minimization framework is proposed to find optimal seamlines within overlap regions for image mosaicking through rounding visually obvious foreground objects. Finally, experimental results on several representative image sets illustrate the superiority of our proposed approaches.