An automatic mosaicking method for building facade texture mapping using a monocular close-range image sequence
This paper presents an automatic mosaicking method for generating building facade textures from a monocular close-range digital image sequence. The process begins with the computation of the camera parameters (except the coordinates of the projective center), which are determined by combining vanishing point geometry with constraints of a straight line bundle as well as prior information of parallel lines in object space. The raw images are later rectified for the purpose of eliminating their salient geometric distortion. Next, automatic retrieval of the relevant image segment is implemented using the detecting range variance by means of the histogram of projective differences between the corresponding points for each of the facades from the raw image sequence. A strip model of the least-squares adjustment, which is similar to the strip block adjustment in aerial triangulation, is employed to determine the spatial alignment of each of the image segments in order to generate the facade textures from the relevant image segments. Afterwards, the entire building facade texture is mosaicked by ortho-image generation. Two refining strategies are proposed to optimize the mosaic result. One is refining the mosaic region where corresponding points are difficult to match but plenty of horizontal lines are available, and the constraint of corresponding horizontal lines is introduced to implement this process. The other strategy is to refine the unsatisfactory mosaic region by densifying the corresponding points by means of the spatial alignment of the relevant image segment computed by the strip method. The experimental results indicate that this method is widely applicable and compares well with other reported approaches with regard to automation level and applicability, for uncalibrated images as well as images with large geometric distortions.
mosaicking building facade texture mapping terrestrial imaging digital camera calibration