Precise Geometric Correction and Robust Mosaicking for Airborne Lightweight Optical Butting Infrared Imaging System

In view of the urgent need for high-resolution and high-precision infrared image data for geological environmental monitoring, we have developed a lightweight optical butting infrared imaging system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to obtain infrared image data. In this paper, we proposed a robust mosaicking method combination of as-projective-as-possible warps and similarity transformation, which uses multiple images to generate a wide viewing field panorama. It is developed based on an analysis of projective transformation and similarity transformation. The proposed method simultaneously takes into consideration the flexibility of alignment and the preservation of image shapes. On the overlapping regions, it performs as-projective-as-possible warps. On the non-overlapping regions, it gradually becomes a similarity warp. The results show that the proposed method weakens the “ghosting,” shape distortion, and area distortion.