Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been used in many military and civil applications, particularly surveillance. One of the best ways to use the capacity of a UAS imaging system is by constructing a mosaic or panorama of the recorded video. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the construction of super-resolution mosaicking. The algorithm is based on the Conjugate Gradient (CG) method. Geman -McClure prior is used together with four different cliques to deal with the ill-conditioned inverse problem and to preserve edges. We present the results with synthetic and real UAS surveillance data, resulting in a great improvement of the visual resolution. For the case of synthetic images, we obtained a PSNR of 47.0 dB, as well as a significant increase in the details visible for the case of real UAS frames in only ten iterations.

Date Published: 29 May 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8752, Modeling and Simulation for Defense Systems and Applications VIII, 875209 (29 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2017930

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8752:
Modeling and Simulation for Defense Systems and Applications VIII
Eric J. Kelmelis, Editor(s)