Fast Mosaic of High-Resolution Multiple-View Images of Surfaces from Architectural and Heritage Structures

This paper presents an automatic and fast method for creating seamless mosaics from images captured by a special aerial imaging system when imaging architectural and heritage structures. The whole scheme was made following three principles: speediness, robustness and the adaptability to the aerial image acquisition system in our project. We first extract keypoints and match them using the newest SURF algorithm, which can generate large sets of corresponding points fast and robustly. Then, a simple least-squares algorithm can estimate the projective transform parameters. In addition, to increase the robustness, lens distortion correction and global optimization strategy are also adopted. Finally, the aligned set of registered images is processed by an image fusion technique to produce effectively seamless composite images.