Research of Image Automatic Clipping Methods in Air-Ground Data Link System

In communications using air-ground data link, the data that comes from various airborne image sensors is getting huge while the bandwidth of the data link is relatively narrow. To improve image transmission efficiency in battle field condition, it is required that the images acquired by a (CCD) aerial camera using central projection were transmitted at high fidelity and speed over long distance. This paper proposed an airborne automatic data reduction scheme to solve the aforementioned problem. The key steps of this scheme are automatic image matching and clipping. The algorithm utilizes the strong logic relativities among adjacent aero-photographs and it is based on the model of 2D affine transformation. When detecting no highlighted moving targets, the algorithm performs automatic clipping for overlapping part of two adjacent images by using of Fourier-Mellin transform. The experimental results of automatic clipping and mosaic showed that the proposed algorithm was computationally efficient and easy to practice. As a robust algorithm, which has potential practical application, it can also effectively reduce downstream waiting data