Real-time mosaicking for infrared videos from an oblique sweeping camera

Image mosaicking is widely used in Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for large-scale ground surface analysis. However, most existing mosaicking methods can only be used in offline processing due to the enormous amounts of computation. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical algorithm for real-time infrared video mosaicking. To achieve this, a novel fast template matching algorithm based on Sum of Cosine Differences (SCD) is proposed to coarsely match the sequential images. The high speed of the proposed template matching algorithm is obtained by computing correlation with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). We also propose a novel fast Least Squares Matching (LSM) algorithm for inter-frame fine registration, which can significantly reduce the computation without degrading the matching accuracy. In addition, the proposed fast LSM can effectively adapt for noise degradation and geometric distortion. Based on the proposed fast template matching algorithm and fine registration algorithm, we develop a practical real-time mosaicking approach which can produce seamless mosaic image highly efficiently. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is not just computationally efficient but also robust against various noise distortions.