AVALIAÇÃO DE MÉTODOS DE MOSAICO DE IMAGENS APLICADOS EM IMAGENS AGRÍCOLAS OBTIDAS POR MEIO DE RPA

Abstract

Image mosaicing is the alignment of multiple images into larger compositions which represent portions of a 3D scene. A number of image mosaicing algorithms have been proposed over the last two decades. At the same time, the continuous advent of new mosaicing methods in recent years makes it really difficult to choose an appropriate mosaicing algorithm for a specific purpose. This study aimed to evaluate low level feature-based mosaicing methods using agricultural images obtained by Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA). Low-level feature detecting algorithms can be invariant to scale and rotation, among other transformations that commonly occur in agricultural images obtained by RPA. Harris corner detector, FAST corner detector, SIFT feature detector and SURF detector were evaluated according to the computational performance and the quality of the generated mosaic. To evaluate computational performance, were taken into account factors such as the detected features average per image, the number of images used to compose the mosaic and the processing time (user time). To evaluate quality, the mosaics generated by each method were used to estimate the Asian soybean rust severity and a comparison with the commercial software Pix4Dmapper was performed. Regarding quality, there was no significant difference and all methods proved to be on the same level. SURF detector, among all methods, got the worst performance using, on average, only 33.1% of the input images to compose the mosaics. Harris corner detector proved to be the fastest solution, becoming 7.27% faster to compose the mosaic. However, in its final mosaic, the use of the input images was poor: only 52%. FAST corner detector had the best utilization of the input images, however, significant discontinuities of objects occurred in its final mosaic. In addition, it had a considerably longer processing time than the other methods, becoming 6.42 times slower to compose the mosaic. SIFT feature detector had the second best processing time and the second best utilization of the input images, without presenting object discontinuities problems. Therefore, presented itself as the most suitable method for agricultural images obtained by RPA.