that the quality of the results strengthen the validity of
the feature track map computation of Sect. 2.3.
As it can be seen from the output mosaics, the pro-
posed method is effective in choosing the reference
mosaic homography (see Sect. 2.4). Note that, us-
ing the first image frame as reference, in the case of
Fig. 8(a) would lead to very distorted images, as can
be observed even from corresponding initial merged
sub-mosaics (see Fig. 5 (top and middle rows, green
and red frames)). Indeed, the proposed method al-
lowed us to get in a completely automatic way as
good-looking mosaics as those obtained with strong
expert user intervention.
4 CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes a new approach to compute the
best reference mosaic homography that minimizes the
frame distortions in the case of planar mosaics. For
this purpose, a full hierarchical mosaicing pipeline
was designed, with particular attention to underwa-
ter mosaicing applications that, due to the scene com-
plexity, require robust feature tracking schemes as the
one proposed in this paper. Experimental results show
the validity of our method, yielding to high quality
unsupervised mosaics.
Future work will include more evaluation tests as
well incorporating in the pipeline new stitching algo-
rithms (Zaragoza et al., 2014; Zhang and Liu, 2014)
to replace the standard 7-point homography compu-
tation, with the aim to improve results in the case of
strong 3D content.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Thanks to Pamela Gambogi of the “Soprintendenza
per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana”, Italian Min-
istry of Culture, for providing the input video se-
quences.
This work has been carried out during the AR-
ROWS project, supported by the European Commis-
sion under the Environment Theme of the “7th Frame-
work Programme for Research and Technological De-
velopment”.
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