Fast multicamera video stitching for underwater wide field-of-view observation

Qing-Zhong Li; Yang Zhang; Feng-Ni Zang

doi:10.1117/1.JEI.23.2.023008

18 March 2014 Fast multicamera video stitching for underwater wide field-of-view observation

Qing-Zhong Li, Yang Zhang, Feng-Ni Zang

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Electronic Imaging, Vol. 23, Issue 2, 023008 (March 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.23.2.023008

Abstract

Underwater robots equipped with a single forward-looking camera usually have a very limited visual range or field-of-view (FOV) due to the light absorption and scattering effects in the underwater environment, which greatly limit their applications for underwater video-based inspection, navigation, and so on. Although underwater robots using multicamera imaging systems can achieve wide FOV of surroundings, parallax distortion and time-consuming stitching computation are encountered, especially for short-distance observation. To overcome these problems, we present a fast multicamera video-stitching algorithm based on adaptive adjustment of image transformation matrix between adjacent images. The proposed method uses a fast and adaptive optimization algorithm to search the optimal parameters of transformation matrix that can minimize the parallax distortion due to short-distance imaging and maximize the matching degree between adjacent overlapping image areas. The advantage of the proposed stitching method lies in that it avoids the complex and time-consuming computations for feature-point extraction and matching. The experimental results show that the proposed method can construct multicamera-based wide FOV video effectively and meets the real-time requirement of wide FOV video observation for both indoor and underwater scenes.

Citation Download Citation

Qing-Zhong Li, Yang Zhang, and Feng-Ni Zang "Fast multicamera video stitching for underwater wide field-of-view observation," Journal of Electronic Imaging 23(2), 023008 (18 March 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.23.2.023008

Published: 18 March 2014

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