Seamline network generation based on foreground segmentation for orthoimage mosaicking

For multiple orthoimages mosaicking, the detection of an optimal seamline in an overlapped region and the generation of a seamline network are two key issues for creating a seamless and pleasant large-scale digital orthophoto map. In this paper, a novel system is proposed to generate the large-scale orthophoto by mosaicking multiple orthoimages via Graph cuts. The proposed system is comprised of two parts. In the first part, to ensure that the detected seamline avoids crossing the obvious objects, a novel foreground segmentation-based approach is proposed to detect the optimal seamline for two adjacent images. The foreground objects are segmented from the overlapped region at the superpixel level followed by the pixel-level seamline optimization. In the second part, we propose a novel seamline network generation approach to produce the large-scale orthophoto by mosaicking multiple orthoimages. The pairwise and junction regions extracted from the initial network are refined using two-label and multi-label Graph cuts, respectively. The key advantage of our proposed seamline network is that junction points can be automatically and optimally found using the multi-label Graph cuts. The experimental results on two groups of orthoimages show that our proposed system can generate high-quality seamline networks with less artifacts, and that it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm and the commercial software based on visual comparison and statistical evaluation.