LAPM: a tool for underwater large-area photo-mosaicking

摘要

This paper presents a new tool for large-area photo-mosaicking (LAPM tool).This tool was developed specifically for the purpose of underwatermosaicking, and it is aimed at providing end-user scientists with an easyand robust way to construct large photo-mosaics from any set of images. Itis notably capable of constructing mosaics with an unlimited number ofimages on any modern computer (minimum 1.30 GHz, 2 GB RAM). Themosaicking process can rely on both feature matching and navigation data.This is complemented by an intuitive graphical user interface, which givesthe user the ability to select feature matches between any pair ofoverlapping images. Finally, mosaic files are given geographic attributesthat permit direct import into ArcGIS. So far, the LAPM tool has beensuccessfully used to construct geo-referenced photo-mosaics with photo andvideo material from several scientific cruises. The largest photo-mosaiccontained more than 5000 images for a total area of about 105 000 m2.This is the first article to present and to provide a finished andfunctional program to construct large geo-referenced photo-mosaics of theseafloor using feature detection and matching techniques. It also presentsconcrete examples of photo-mosaics produced with the LAPM tool.