Fast Anchor Point Matching for Emergency UAV Image Stitching Using Position and Pose Information

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) techniques, UAV images are becoming more widely used. However, as an essential step of UAV image application, the computation of stitching remains time intensive, especially for emergency applications. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel approach to use the position and pose information of UAV images to speed up the process of image stitching, called FUIS (fast UAV image stitching). This stitches images by feature points. However, unlike traditional approaches, our approach rapidly finds several anchor-matches instead of a lot of feature matches to stitch the image. Firstly, from a large number of feature points, we design a method to select a small number of them that are more helpful for stitching as anchor points. Then, a method is proposed to more quickly and accurately match these anchor points, using position and pose information. Experiments show that our method significantly reduces the time consumption compared with the-state-of-art approaches with accuracy guaranteed.