Mosaicking images [panoramic imaging]

Two methods of mosaicking images were developed, one for the simple case of a shift between two following images and another one for the general case. For the simple mosaicking, the error rate is acceptable for both cases of noisy or less noisy images. Owing to the fact that future generations of scouts would be provided with the 2.4 GHz transmission frequency, panoramic mosaics can be created with a high level of success. The operation is completely automated, and the execution time is close to three minutes for each mosaic. For the case of mosaicking images in general, the major problem is that the quality of the images given by the scout does not allow for choosing a small number of points for the Harris detector. This leads to long execution times. Furthermore, it is extremely hard to realize a panoramic vision by such a method because it is still unreliable without the intervention of an operator. Building 360/spl deg/ mosaics is not practical. Nevertheless, the general method can be used for creating precise mosaics of three consecutive images, thus providing wide-angle images. Image resulting from this operation represents 100/spl deg/ mosaics. Alas, the time of calculation is still a considerable four minutes.