Blending zone determination for aerial orthimage mosaicking

Creating a composed image from a set of aerial images is a fundamental step in orthomosaic generation. One of the processes involved in this technique is determining an optimal seamline in an overlapping region to stitch image patches seamlessly. Most previous studies have solved this optimization problem by searching for a one-pixel-wide seamline with an objective function. This strategy significantly reduced pixel mismatches on the seamline caused by geometric distortions of images but did not fully consider color discontinuity and mismatch problems that occur around the seamline, which sometimes cause mosaicking artifacts. This study proposes a blending zone determination scheme with a novel path finding algorithm to reduce the occurrence of unwanted artifacts. Instead of searching for a one-pixel-wide seamline, a blending zone, which is a k-pixel-wide seamline that passes through high-similarity pixels in the overlapping region, is determined using a hierarchical structure. This strategy allows for not only seamless stitching but also smooth color blending of neighboring image patches. Moreover, the proposed method searches for a blending zone without the pre-process of highly mismatched pixel removal and additional geographic data of road vectors and digital surface/elevation models, which increases the usability of the approach. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of aerial images demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to related methods in terms of avoidance of passing highly mismatched pixels.