Image Blending Techniques and their Application in Underwater Mosaicing

· ·
· Springer Science & Business Media
5.0
1 review
Ebook
107
Pages
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

Underwater surveys have numerous scientific applications, and optical imaging by underwater vehicles can provide high-resolution visual information of the ocean floor. However, the particular challenges of the underwater medium, such as light attenuation, require the imaging to be performed as close to the seabed as possible. Hence, optically mapping large seafloor areas can only be achieved by building image mosaics from a set of reduced-area pictures. Unfortunately, the seams along image boundaries are often noticeable, requiring image blending, the merging step in which these artifacts are minimized. Yet processing tools and bottlenecks have restricted underwater photo-mosaics to small areas despite the hundreds of thousands of square meters that modern surveys can cover.

This work proposes strategies and solutions to tackle the problem of building photo-mosaics of very large underwater optical surveys, presenting contributions to the image preprocessing, enhancing and blending steps, and resulting in an improved visual quality of the final photo-mosaic.

The text opens with a comprehensive review of mosaicing and blending techniques, before proposing an approach for large scale underwater image mosaicing and blending. In the image preprocessing step, a depth dependent illumination compensation function is used to solve the non-uniform illumination appearance due to light attenuation. For image enhancement, the image contrast variability due to different acquisition altitudes is compensated using an adaptive contrast enhancement based on an image quality reference selected through a total variation criterion. In the blending step, a graph-cut strategy operating in the image gradient domain over the overlapping regions is suggested. Next, an out-of-core blending strategy for very large scale photo-mosaics is presented and tested on real data. Finally, the performance of the approach is evaluated and compared with other approaches.

Ratings and reviews

5.0
1 review

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.