Low bit depth images for small & micro-scale UAVs

For aerial imaging with UAVs, where there is a limited transmission rate/bandwidth, using low bit depth images instead of full images offers a number of advantages. For example, reducing data transmission, removing superfluous details, and reducing computational loading of on-board platforms (especially for small or micro-scale UAVs). However, the main drawback of using low bit depth imagery is discarding image details of the scene. Fortunately, this can be reconstructed by fusing a sequence of related low bit depth images, which have been properly aligned. To reduce computational complexity and obtain a less distorted result, a similarity transformation is used to approximate the geometric alignment between two images of the same scene, which is estimated using a phase correlation technique. It is shown that the phase correlation method is capable of registering low bit depth images, without any modification, or any pre and/or post-processing.