Automatic registration and mosaicking for airborne multispectral image sequences

Airborne remote sensing has important applications in agriculture monitoring because of the flexibility of system deployment. The major obstacle in practical use is its high cost. To reduce the cost, a multispectral system can be assembled by using individual cameras onboard a small aerial platform, such as a miniature unmanned aerial vehicle (mini-UAV). In such a case, the cameras may have shifting and rotational misalignment, even after careful adjustment. Contiguous frames are captured as the platform flies. So multi-band registration within a single frame and frame-to-frame mosaicking are necessary to obtain a co-registered multispectral image for the entire monitoring area before any commercial product can be generated to support practical decision-making. In this paper, we present automatic algorithms to achieve this goal. These algorithms are particularly usaful to the image scenes where no distinctive features are available. Both automatic and manual evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the developed algorithms in multi-sensor data fusion for overall flat terrain without distinctive features.