Aerial Image Mosaicking with the Aid of Vector Roads

This article proposes a novel approach for using vector roads for the generation of seamline networks for aerial image mosaicking. A representative seamline is extracted as follows. First, the straight skeleton of the overlapping area of adjacent images is extracted. Second, vector roads in the overlapping regions are overlaid with the extracted skeleton to build a weighted graph G and the lowest-cost path is considered as a seamline candidate. Finally, the seamline candidate is refined by considering its surrounding pixels. The refined seamline is employed as the final seamline. The resultant seamlines commonly follow the centerlines of roads as much as possible and the mosaic image appears more seamless. Moreover, the vector-based approach is typically more efficient than the existing raster-based approaches: the vector-based approach is nearly ten times faster than a raster-based representative.