GPU Acceleration of UAV Image Splicing Using Oriented Fast and Rotated Brief Combined with PCA

In this study, an accelerating method of oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF combined with principal component analysis (ORB/PCA) is proposed for splicing detection of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. Compared to traditional scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and speeded up robust features (SURF) methods, the proposed ORB/PCA can not only be faster but also produce more accurate. Moreover, in order for the proposed ORB to be effective for image stitching process in near real-time, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) application programming interface of graphics processing unit (GPU) is cooperated to speed up the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU based ORB/PCA framework is suitable for splicing detection of UAV images in Earth remote sensing. It can improve the image stitching process both in time and accuracy compared to conventional methods.