Mosaic of near ground UAV videos under parallax effects

This paper explores the exciting possibility of using Google Earth as a software laboratory for studying wide-area scene analysis using near-ground aerial imagery. To this end we present a new image mosaicing algorithm capable of generating large mosaics from imagery captured by a near-ground aerial vehicle. Our algorithm eschews camera calibration and can handle strong parallax effects visible in the captured imagery. The imagery is generated by simulating an aerial vehicle flying over the New York city within the Google Earth environment. We also evaluate the proposed approach on a real dataset captured by a physical aerial vehicle, demonstrating that the algorithm that was initially developing using synthetic imagery does indeed work on real data.