Abstract: The regular manifold projection method for video stitching is very efficient but it requires an invariant dominant motion. However, aerial videos captured on unmanned aerial vehicles cannot be stitched by it due to the flexibility in their flight routes. This paper proposes an improved method to handle the varying direction problems via multi-direction strips. First, various slope strips for different scan directions are defined. When the major motion direction in the aerial video changes, the most appropriate strip are chosen to minimize the bias angle between the scan direction and the motion direction. Experiments show our method can generate better panorama result as compared with other methods.

Key words: aerial video, video stitching, manifold projection, strip stitching, aerial photography, image registration, image fusion