Study on mosaic method for new mode satellite images with high spatial resolution covering urban areas

New imaging mode has been brought up for collecting multiple scenes in one pass, as is implemented on World View-II. This greatly helps for acquiring high spatial resolution images that cover urban areas, and is to be adopted in the coming Chinese satellites. This paper is to discuss the mosaic characteristic and propose a mosaic line generation method by integrating correlation and the road information. The mosaic line is formed by linking the unique mosaic point on each line restricted within the road. We position the starting point by connectivity analysis of the road lines, and then locate the adjacent point along the road with connectivity analysis. A weighed vector, combining correlation and distance to centre of the road, is used to pick the best point. The points are located on the road unless it is unavoidable, for example, the road ends or the line touches edge of the image. This method provides instant mosaic line generation for urban areas with road information available in most cases. By resorting to the road, the mosaic line is more applicable since many problems for mosaic of high spatial resolution images are solved, for example, tilting of the buildings, the shadows, motions of the vehicles etc. Experiments have been done with WV-II images and gained favorable results.