Remote Sensing Image Mosaic by Incorporating Segmentation and the Shortest Path

Combining segmentation and shortest path searching, a novel seamline extraction method for remote sensing imagery is presented. It detects an optimal seamline along the boundaries of land cover objects so as to reduce the effect of the discontinuity on the seamline of the mosaic image. First, the valid overlaps of the reference image and the registered image was determined, as well as the starting point and the ending point. Second, watershed segmentation was applied to sketch out the boundaries of salient objects in the overlaps of the reference image. Third, after a difference image between the reference image and the registered image was obtained, those segmentation paths which pass through segments with an enormous difference were removed. Finally, an undirected weighted graph was built according to the remaining segmentation paths, and the seamline defined by the shortest path from the starting point to the ending point was found via the Dijkstra algorithm. Experimental results on Landsat-7 ETM+ images suggested that the presented method was capable of generating a seamless mosaic image.