Natural Color Satellite Image Mosaicking Using Quadratic Programming in Decorrelated Color Space

Generating mosaics of orthorectified remote sensing images is a challenging task because of the colorimetric differences between adjacent images introduced by land use, surface illumination, atmospheric conditions, and sensor. Most of the existing color correction methods involve pairwise techniques, which are limited when the collection of images is large with numerous overlaps. Besides, available techniques do not operate in a color space suited for true-color processing. This paper presents a simple and robust method to perform the global colorimetric harmonization of multiple overlapping remote sensing images in natural colors (RGB). Our parameter-free method deals simultaneously with any number of images, with any spatial layout, and without any single reference image. It is based on the resolution of a quadratic programming (QP) optimization problem. It operates in the lαβ decorrelated color space, which is well suited for human vision of natural scenes. The results obtained from the mosaicking of 132 RapidEye color orthoimages over mainland France demonstrate good potential for performing colorimetric harmonization automatically and effectively.

[1]  J. Cihlar.  Land cover mapping of large areas from satellites: Status and research priorities , 2000 .

[2]  Christopher D. Elvidge,et al.  Relative radiometric normalization of Landsat Multispectral Scanner data using an automatic scattergram-controlled regression , 1998 .

[3]  Y. Afek,et al.  Mosaicking of orthorectified aerial images , 1998 .

[4]  Wei Xu,et al.  Performance evaluation of color correction approaches for automatic multi-view image and video stitching , 2010, 2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[5]  Stephen J. Wright,et al.  Object-oriented software for quadratic programming , 2003, TOMS.

[6]  Victor J. D. Tsai,et al.  Automated image mosaicking , 2005 .

[7]  Jun Zhou,et al.  Manifold alignment based color transfer for multiview image stitching , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.

[8]  D. Ruderman,et al.  Statistics of cone responses to natural images: implications for visual coding , 1998 .

[9]  R. Bindschadler,et al.  The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica , 2008 .

[10]  Erik Reinhard,et al.  Color Transfer between Images , 2001, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[11]  Martin Kerschner,et al.  Seamline detection in colour orthoimage mosaicking by use of twin snakes , 2001 .

[12]  William J. Volchok,et al.  Radiometric scene normalization using pseudoinvariant features , 1988 .

[13]  Erik Reinhard,et al.  A Survey of Color Mapping and its Applications , 2014, Eurographics.

[14]  B. Guindon,et al.  Assessing the radiometric fidelity of high resolution satellite image mosaics , 1997 .

[15]  Michael K. Ng,et al.  A Variational Approach for Image Stitching II: Using Image Gradients , 2013, SIAM J. Imaging Sci..

[16]  Mi Wang,et al.  Automatic Generation of Seamline Network Using Area Voronoi Diagrams With Overlap , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[17]  Y. Shiren,et al.  TWO-DIMENSIONAL SEAM-POINT SEARCHING IN DIGITAL IMAGE MOSAICKING , 1989 .

[18]  Emmanuel Christophe,et al.  The Orfeo Toolbox remote sensing image processing software , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[19]  S. Goetz,et al.  Radiometric rectification - Toward a common radiometric response among multidate, multisensor images , 1991 .

[20]  Jan Flusser,et al.  Image registration methods: a survey , 2003, Image Vis. Comput..

[21]  Michael J Ackerman,et al.  Engineering and algorithm design for an image processing Api: a technical report on ITK--the Insight Toolkit. , 2002, Studies in health technology and informatics.

[22]  Christopher D. Elvidge,et al.  Comparison of relative radiometric normalization techniques , 1996 .

[23]  Shihwa Lee,et al.  Tone Correction with Dynamic Objects for Seamless Image Mosaic , 2010, ECCV Workshops.

[24]  Edward H. Adelson,et al.  A multiresolution spline with application to image mosaics , 1983, TOGS.