Towards Using Virtual Forces for Image Registration

This paper introduces a novel method for registering a large amount of aerial images when camera parameters are almost unknown and no reference images are available. The envisioned application is the creation of an overview map of a disaster area from images made by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras. The camera systems only have uncertain information about flight attitude. With traditional methods, the relatively small perspective errors per image sum up over time resulting in perspective errors which prevent building a consistent map from successively arriving images. By using virtual forces between images, the image parameters are continuously adapted to the current map. The small projective errors of quasi orthographic images are distributed among overlapping images. Having UAVs which deliver quasi orthographic images, our approach can build a contemporary overview without the need to have all images in advance.