Aerial Image Registration for Tracking

To facilitate the tracking of moving targets in a video, the relation between the camera and the scene is kept fixed by registering the video frames at the ground level. When the camera capturing the video is fixed with respect to the scene, detected motion will represent the target motion. However, when a camera in motion is used to capture the video, image registration at ground level is required to separate camera motion from target motion. An image registration method is introduced that is capable of registering images from different views of a 3-D scene in the presence of occlusion. The proposed method is capable of withstanding considerable occlusion and homogeneous areas in images. The only requirement of the method is for the ground to be locally flat and sufficient ground cover be visible in the frames being registered. Experimental results of 17 videos from the Brown University data set demonstrate robustness of the method in registering consecutive frames in videos covering various urban and suburban scenes. Additional experimental results are presented demonstrating the suitability of the method in registering images captured from different views of hilly and coastal scenes.