Drone Image Stitching Using Local Least Square Alignment

Abstract

This paper proposes a strategy for drone image stitching using local least square alignment, which aims to effectively stitch multiple overlapping drone images into a natural panoramic image. Existing traditional methods using simple homography cannot handle the situation that the input drone images have parallax effect, and the mosaic result always suffers from artifacts. In order to achieve natural-looking stitching results without the above limitation, we divide the proposed method into the following two steps, namely, local least square alignment and global similarity constraint. Starting from initial feature sets obtained by traditional feature extraction methods, we construct a robust alignment energy based on parallax errors to adaptively eliminate parallax effects. The energy can be efficiently minimized used least square estimate. Combined with global similarity constraint, our proposed strategy can flexibly improve the naturalness of the results. Experiments show that our stitching strategy can more effectively eliminate parallax effects and achieve natural-looking results compared to other state-of-the-art methods.