MGRAPH: A Multigraph Homography Method to Generate Incremental Mosaics in Real-Time From UAV Swarms

During the last years, UAVs have proved to be an essential tool in the mapping industry. Furthermore, the next generation of UAVs is envisioned to work cooperatively, following the swarming/teaming concept. This letter presents MGRAPH, a novel approach to generate an incremental mosaic in real time from an UAV swarm. The algorithm is based on the generation and fusion of multiples submosaics represented by homography graphs. Implementation takes advantage of parallel processing and UAV metadata to generate a georeferenced mosaic over a geographic information system. A comparison with other mosaicking pipelines on three datasets demonstrates that MGRAPH could be an alternative to address the generation of mosaics from a swarm of UAVs.

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