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Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (17): 331799.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2025.31799

• Electronics and Electrical Engineering and Control • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Research progress of UAV aerial image mosaic methods

Xiaowei JIANG, Yiquan WU()   

  1. College of Electronic and Information Engineering,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106,China
  • Received:2025-01-13 Revised:2025-03-26 Accepted:2025-04-28 Online:2025-05-12 Published:2025-05-08
  • Contact: Yiquan WU E-mail:nuaaimage@163.com
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(61573183)

Abstract:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) plays an important role in military reconnaissance, agricultural monitoring, urban planning and management due to its advantages of light weight, flexibility, wide coverage and low cost. In these applications, due to the limited field of view of UAV aerial photography, it is impossible to obtain high-definition panoramic images of the complete target area. Therefore, image mosaic technology is essential. In recent years, the development of deep learning has brought renewed attention to UAV aerial image mosaic technology. This paper reviews the research progress of UAV aerial image mosaic methods in the last 10 years. Firstly, the development process and main process of UAV aerial image mosaic method are introduced. Secondly, the traditional methods of UAV aerial image mosaic are described in detail according to the three steps of image preprocessing, image registration and image fusion. The advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in each step are also compared. This paper then describes in detail the UAV aerial image mosaic method based on deep learning from three aspects: semantic segmentation, image registration, and image mosaic framework which both based on deep learning. Common UAV aerial image mosaic datasets and image mosaic performance evaluation indicators are sorted out, and five typical application fields of UAV aerial image mosaic technology are listed. Finally, this paper highlights several technical challenges that UAV aerial image mosaic still faces and provides an outlook on the future work directions.

Key words: UAV aerial photography, image mosaic, deep learning, image registration, image fusion

CLC Number: