Development of Frequency Domain Matching for Automated Mosaicking of Textureless Images

To make a mosaicked image, we need to estimate the geometric relationship between individual images. For such estimation, we needs tiepoint information. In general, feature-based methods are used to extract tiepoints. However, in the case of textureless images, feature-based methods are hardly applicable. In this paper, we propose a frequency domain matching method for automated mosaicking of textureless images. There are three steps in the proposed method. The first step is to convert color images to grayscale images, remove noise, and extract edges. The second step is to define a Region Of Interest (ROI). The third step is to perform phase correlation between two images and select the point with best correlation as tiepoints. For experiments, we used GOCI image slots and general frame camera images. After the three steps, we produced reliable tiepoints from textureless as well as textured images. We have proved application possibility of the proposed method.